When the Jewish scribes were weaving Ninurta/Gilgamesh/Lugal-Zaggisi/Sargon into their new bible, they would have hardly overlooked the most important part of the story—the doomed mighty Tower of Babel. We're going to get into that, but before going further it would be helpful to understand the background, which takes us to ancient Sumer:

These early cities [in Sumer], which existed by 3500 bce, were called temple towns because they were built around the temple of the local god. The temples were eventually built up on towers called ziggurats (holy mountains), which had ramps or staircases winding up around the exterior. Public buildings and marketplaces were built around these shrines.

The Sumerian temple was a small brick house that the god was supposed to visit periodically. It was ornamented so as to recall the reed houses built by the earliest Sumerians in the valley. This house, however, was set on a brick platform, which became larger and taller as time progressed until the platform at Ur (built around 2100 BCE) was 150 by 200 feet (45 by 60 meters) and 75 feet (23 meters) high. These Mesopotamian temple platforms are called ziggurats, a word derived from the Assyrian ziqquratu, meaning "high." They were symbols in themselves; the ziggurat at Ur was planted with trees to make it represent a mountain. There the god visited Earth, and the priests climbed to its top to worship.

The ziggurat continued as the essential temple form of Mesopotamia during the later Assyrian and Babylonian eras. In these later times it became taller and more tower-like, perhaps with a spiral path leading up to the temple at the top. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the main temple of Babylon, the famous Tower of Babel, was such a tower divided into seven diminishing stages, each a different color: white, black, purple, blue, orange, silver, and gold.

Each Sumerian city rose up around the shrine of a local god. As a reflection of a city's wealth, its temple became an elaborate structure. The temple buildings stood on a spacious raised platform reached by staircases and ramps. From the platform rose the temple tower, called a ziggurat (holy mountain), with a circular staircase or ramp around the outside. On the temple grounds were quarters for priests, officials, accountants, musicians, and singers; treasure chambers; storehouses for grain, tools, and weapons; and workshops for bakers, pottery makers, brewers, leatherworkers, spinners and weavers, and jewelers. There were also pens for keeping the sheep and goats that were destined for sacrifice to the temple god. (Posted on the Internet at Ancient Sumeria Primary Author: Robert A. Guisepi, with portions contributed by F. Roy Willis of the University of California, 1980 and 2003.

Now here we go again; once again the oldest known version of a bible story is to be found orginating in ancient Sumer. In this case it's the Tower of Babel, the similarity of which to the Genesis story is revealing. The Sumerian tale involves someone named Enmerkar who builds a massive temple tower and who, at one point in the story, implores the god Enki to disrupt the linguistic unity of the surrounding nations. When the Sumerians were conquered and absorbed by the Babylonians, that tale and temple towers in general became a part of Babylonian culture. In 440 bce the ancient historian Herodotus gives his insight into the most famous of Babylon's temple towers—the Tower of Babel:

Babylon's outer wall is the main defence of the city. There is, however, a second inner wall, of less thickness than the first, but very little inferior to it in strength. The center of each division of the town was occupied by a fortress. In the one stood the palace of the kings, surrounded by a wall of great strength and size: in the other was the sacred precinct of Jupiter (Zeus) Belus, a square enclosure two furlongs [402 m] each way, with gates of solid brass; which was also remaining in my time. In the middle of the precinct there was a tower of solid masonry, a furlong [201 m] in length and breadth, upon which was raised a second tower, and on that a third, and so on up to eight. The ascent to the top is on the outside, by a path which winds round all the towers. When one is about half-way up, one finds a resting-place and seats, where persons are wont to sit some time on their way to the summit. On the topmost tower there is a spacious temple, and inside the temple stands a couch of unusual size, richly adorned, with a golden table by its side. There is no statue of any kind set up in the place, nor is the chamber occupied of nights by any one but a single native woman, who, as the Chaldeans, the priests of this god, affirm, is chosen for himself by the deity out of all the women of the land.

Historians believe that the Tower of Jupiter Belus refers to the Akkadian god Bel, whose name was hellenised by Herodotus to Zeus Belus. They also think it likely that the tower in Herodotus' account is the giant ziggurat dedicated to the god Marduk (Etemenanki) and that it was abandoned after being ruined by earthquakes and lightening damage. This belief is given weight by the inscription of King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon found on the ruins of this abandoned temple tower. In 570s bce the king sought to restore the ziggurat and wrote thus of its ruinous state:

A former king built the Temple of the Seven Lights of the Earth, but he did not complete its head. Since a remote time, people had abandoned it, without order expressing their words. Since that time earthquakes and lightning had dispersed its sun-dried clay; the bricks of the casing had split, and the earth of the interior had been scattered in heaps. Merodach, the great lord, excited my mind to repair this building. I did not change the site, nor did I take away the foundation stone ... as it had been in former times. So I founded it, I made it; as it had been in ancient days, I so exalted the summit.

This background is why the editors of the Anchor Bible Genesis make it clear from whence came the inspiration of the Genesis Tower of Babel account:

We need look no farther than the account of the building of Babylon and its temple than Enuma elis VI, lines 60-62 (ANET, p. 69). In describing the construction of Esagila, as the sacred precinct was called, the Akk[ian]. text says: "The first year they molded its bricks (libittasu iltabnu). And when the second year arrived they raised the head of Esagila toward Apsu." Apsu is, among other things, a poetic term for the boundless expanse of the sky conceived as one of the cosmic sources of sweet water. It so happens, moreover, that the Sumerian name Esagila means literally "the structure with upraised head." ... Of far greater consequence are the positive results: first, that the biblical story about the Tower of Babel had a demonstrable source in cuneiform literature; ...⁵⁴

All this is rather compelling evidence of priestly plagiarism, but what the hell. Let's treat Nimrod and his mighty tower as an inspired godly revelation and examine the tale as told. We'll do that by remembering that Josephus claims that it was because of the Tower of Babel that Yahweh decided to confuse languages on earth. In this claim old Joe is backed by Genesis 11:1:

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. 3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. 4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. 6 And the lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8 So the lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. 9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

The first problem with the above is the contradiction found in Genesis 10:1-5 which tells us that prior to the building of Babel, the sons of Noah and their families had each scattered "after his tongue" (as the King James translators quaintly phrase it): "Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood ... every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations." Gen 10:20 adds: "These are the sons of Ham, after their families, after their tongues, in their countries, and in their nations." And then there's Gen 10:31: "These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations. 32 These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood."

Which account is right? Did men of diverse "tongues" scatter about the earth prior to building of the Tower of Babel, or were they scattered by an act of God during the tower's construction? Both claims can't be right! Well, let's skip yet another contradiction in God's infallible word and note that Genesis 10 does raise the question of how, in a few short generations, the descendants of three brothers spoke different "tongues" and divided accordingly?

Of course the real problem is that the science of languages doesn't support the story of Babel. It is scientifically demonstrable that diverse human language didn't suddenly spring forth about 3,500 years ago in Mesopotamia. Language is ever-changing, and is indeed changing right now; English is a perfect example of that! But not to worry; we won't bore you with the dry history of philology. However, if you're a die-hard fundamentalist Tower of Babel believer, then it would behoove you to do some homework before you go out preaching the Tower of Babel BS to the unbeliever!

Popping back to the Tower thing, there's another oddity we'll look at, which is found in Genesis 11:5 "But the lord [Yahweh] came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building." Did you catch that?

I know it will come as a shock to many readers to learn that Yahweh, or the lord, is one and the same with Jesus Christ of the New Testament—but that's exactly what John 1:1-4 teaches! That being the case, then when Jesus was born of a virgin in Bethlehem, it was not his first coming, as Christian have been led to believe. No! Jesus first coming occurred in the Garden of Eden, where he was wont to walk in the cool of the day. In Genesis 11:5 we Jesus' "second coming" when he paid one of his rare visits to the earth! And hey! Far from coming back to save the world, which we've all been taught is the purpose of his "second coming," Jesus/Yahweh came to earth to personally visit (of all things) a construction site!

Sure, all this sounds rather bizarre, but it is possible that the Omnipotent One had learned something of a lesson after he drowned the whole planet for nothing, and this time he wanted to make a first-hand inspection before doing anything rash. Whatever the circumstances, in verse 6 we are made privy to the Lord's thoughts: "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them."

Now hold the boat here! The Lord isn't saying that the Tower of Babel was an evil undertaking—preachers have added that detail. No. What we clearly see is that Yahweh was pissed off because he didn't want humanity's knowledge to advance! Indeed, this tale reminds us of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil back in Eden when the gods clearly state they wanted man to remain a herd of ignoramuses.

Consider this for a moment. The Lord, in all his wisdom, would be more justified having an attitude about "knowledge" if he looked down on modern man's society. I mean, when we compare an ancient brick tower to modern implements of war (we're talking hydrogen bombs here), or blasting off into space in a rocket ship (talk about reaching into heaven!), we are completely justified in asking why the Lord doesn't come down for an earthly visit today and do something to bring mankind back from the brink of insanity? (Lucky for priests, preachers, rabbis and televangelists that the good Lord seems to have a thing about mankind not getting too smart or they'd all be out of business!)

Anyway, it was for being too smart that Yahweh decided to confuse man's language and scatter them about the globe. What that accomplished was to cause ethnic divisions which resulted in constant warfare, and through the millennia that finally escalated into two world wars and the potential for planetary annihilation. That story is found in Genesis11:9, which is one of those that St. Paul must have failed to read in his yeshiva since he writes in 1Corinthians 14:33 that "God is not the author of confusion, but of peace ..." Yeah, well, whatever you say Paul; but it's a bit obvious that the Lord was acting a bit strange in the Tower story, and any honest person would have to admit it wasn't one of his best epochs.

Speaking of this time period, Genesis 11 offers one of the bible's many pedigree charts. In verse 12 we find that Arphaxad was the father of Shelah. That's fine with me, except Luke 3:35-36 in God's infallible word assures us that Cainan was the father of Shelah and Arphaxad was the grandfather of Shelah.

Okay. Moving right along the Yellow Brick Road, our next stop is in the land of Ur (no, not Oz—Ur!) where we're going to meet one of Shem's boys, who went by the name of Abram and who was destined to become the great patriarch of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Abraham, Isaac & Jacob (sounds like the makings of a law firm!)

Genesis 12:1: "Now the lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee."

This may be repetitious, but it would be good to know who the hell is writing here—how he knew that the Lord spoke to Abram or anyone else. Indeed, there is no historical evidence that Abram—the Lord later changed his name to Abraham—ever existed, unless you count the Ezra-era priests who told Abe's tale as historical fact. But let's pretend that the historical connection of Abraham to the ancient Hindu deity Brahma isn't there and just swim in the historical bilgewater as related in God's infallible word.

I know some will be screaming that this is another minor point, but Genesis 11:26 tells us that Terah, who was Abram's father, was 70 years old when his son Abram was born. No problem so far, but Genesis 11:32 says Terah was 205 years old when he died (making Abram 135 at the time). Gen 12:4 and Acts 7:4 tells us that Abram was 75 when he left Haran, which was after Terah died. This means that Terah could have been no more than 145 when he died, or that Abram was only 75 years old after he had supposedly lived 135 years! Which ever, but we sticklers for the "truth" see yet another flaw in God's infallible word.

Right off the bat, we find another problem because historians tell us that Abe's birthplace—Ur of the Chaldees—did not exist until the eighth century bce, or about 1,000 years after Abraham supposedly lived!⁵⁵ Of course this careless slip of the chronicler rules out Moses as the author and identifies the man writing the tale as living in Babylon at the time of the Babylonian Captivity. Gary Greenberg, President of the Biblical Archaeology Society of New York, makes this point when he writes:

The anachronistic Mesopotamian genealogy of Abraham and his relatives shows that it was a late invention intended to place Hebrew origins in the cultural center of the powerful Mesopotamian empires that followed after the defeat of the Chaldeans by the Persians, and intended to enhance Hebrew prestige within the Babylonian community.⁵⁶

Well, let's sidestep the detail that Abe belongs with the likes of Mickey Mouse, Popeye, Woody Woodpecker and all the other fictional characters we've come to love, and turn to Genesis chapter 12, verses 2-3, where we read Yahweh's promise that he would make a great nation of Abraham, and that all the nations of the earth shall be blessed because of him. It hardly seems worth while pointing out that this promise was never kept. One only has to look at the horror, misery and death the three "great" religions have wrought on the face of the earth—and especially to those who practice them—to understand Yahweh's failure to keep his promise. (And for you "British Israelites" who insist that the peoples of the British Isles and Western Europe are descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, you should be aware that this author has produced a 500-plus page book thoroughly disproving that nonsense!)

In Genesis 15:13 God tells Abraham that his descendants will become slaves in a foreign land, that they would be there for 400 years, which contradicts Exodus 12:40 which says the Israelites were in Egypt for 430 years. Okay. So the Lord was off by 30 years. We'll concede that this not a major slip up. But what is puzzling is why the loving Lord would bless Abe on one hand, and then pronounce a curse on the yet-to-be-born children of Israel with slavery? I mean, what the hell is going on here? Yahweh effectively tells Abraham that he will cast his seed into bondage, allow their women to be ravished, their children abused and murdered, and the whole damned lot to be worked and whipped like animals; but for what reason? What wrong had yet-unborn generations done to deserve this fate? What had Abraham, the father of righteousness, done to deserve this? This whole scenario make no sense at all except as a feeble excuse by a scribe scribbling away thousands of years later attempting to explain why Israel was in Eygptian bondage so that the tales of the Exodus could be told! (This subject is fully explored in the Exodus study.)

There are other problems with the Genesis story of Abraham, some considered but minor technicalities by bible apologists. There's Genesis 12:7, where we read that Yahweh appeared to Abraham, which Yahweh does in a number of other scriptures (Gen 17:1, 18:1, 26:2, 32:30, Exodus 3:16, 6:2-3, 24:9-11, 33:11, Numbers 12:7-8, 14:14, Job 42:5, Amos 7:7-8, 9:1). The problem is that Exodus 33:20, John 1:18 and 1John 4:12 say that no one can see God and live. We have Gen 14:12, which says that Lot was Abraham's nephew while two verses later (14:14, 14:16) Lot is called Abraham's brother. There is the mention in Genesis 14:14 of the land of Dan—1,000 years before the tribe of Dan existed. For those who try to explain this away by noting that "Moses" was using a "contemporary" name to clarify locality, you should keep in mind that Moses never crossed into the "Promised Land" and therefore wouldn't have known about the land of Dan—but a scribe writing in the time of Ezra would know it!

The other problems in Abe's tale are more serious, such as the story of his journey into Egypt where he gives his wife, Sarai, over to the pharaoh, who wanted to have sex with her. (Sarai's name had not yet been changed to Sarah when this tale was told.)

Gen 12:10: "And there was a famine in the land: and Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there; for the famine was grievous in the land. 11: And it came to pass, when he was come near to enter into Egypt, that he said unto Sarai his wife, Behold now, I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon: 12: Therefore it shall come to pass, when the Egyptians shall see thee, that they shall say, This is his wife: and they will kill me, but they will save thee alive. 13: Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister: that it may be well with me for thy sake; and my soul shall live because of thee. 14: And it came to pass, that, when Abram was come into Egypt, the Egyptians beheld the woman that she was very fair. 15: The princes also of Pharaoh saw her, and commended her before Pharaoh: and the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house. 16: And he entreated Abram well for her sake: and he had sheep, and oxen, and he asses, and menservants, and maidservants, and she asses, and camels. 17: And the lord plagued Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai Abram's wife. 18: And Pharaoh called Abram, and said, What is this that thou hast done unto me? why didst thou not tell me that she was thy wife? 19: Why saidst thou, She is my sister? so I might have taken her to me to wife: now therefore behold thy wife, take her, and go thy way. 20: And Pharaoh commanded his men concerning him: and they sent him away, and his wife, and all that he had.

Before getting into the subject of Sarai, notice that there was a severe famine in the land and that Abe had to flee abroad looking for releif. Since Abe was righteous before Yahweh (Genesis 15:6, Romans 4:1-8), then what do we make of Matthew 5:45: "... that ye may be sons of your Father who is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust." (ASV) In other words, Yahweh's failure to provide for his righteous servant set Abraham up for what happened next. (Speaking of Abraham's alleged righteousness, Paul makes it clear in Romans 3:11-12 (paraphrasing Psalm 5:9) that "There is none righteous, no not one; There is none who understands; There is none who seeks after God. They have all gone out of the way; They have together become unprofitable; There is none who does good, no, not one." I wonder which is correct?)

Returning to Genesis 12:10, did you ever really read the story three? Old Honest Abe was willing to prostitute his wife so that he could have a meal in Egypt! Moreover, Honest Abe thought nothing of lying about his wife being his sister, nor taking the abundant wealth/bribe as profit for his lies and his wife's prostitution. Even worse is that the Lord, who (we are assured in Malachi 3:6), changes not, and who has murderous policies against adultery, didn't have a problem with his faithful servant's willingness to hand his wife over for a bout of debauchery. He didn't have a problem with old Abe lying to pharaoh, even though the sin of lying is included in the big ten "no-nos." No! Yahweh's anger wasn't with the pimp Abe and the prostitute Sarah, it was against pharaoh who had actually acted with honor since he was proposing to marry Sarah! And so, pharaoh gets cursed for righteous behavior and Abraham gets plied with wealth for lying, adultery and pimping! I don't know about you, but the moral of this story seems to be that being a lying, thieving pimp is a sure road to wealth and God's favor, whereas being an honest man will get God's boot in your butt!

Certainly the inerrantists will note that Sarah was Abe's half sister and therefore they excuse him for lying, saying that technically he was telling the truth. No. Technically he was lying because Sarah was his wife and Abe was willing to deceive pharaoh in order to prostitute his wife for safety, groceries and loot. Furthermore, it would help us all if inerrantists would explain why incest is declared wrong in God's word, but was okay with that same God (who changes not) when he blessed Abe and Sarah on their marriage? (Deuteronomy 27:22: "Cursed be he that lieth with his sister, the daughter of his father, or the daughter of his mother.")

Actually, this raises another question: If God promises to bless those who bless Abraham and curse those who curse Abraham (Genesis 12:3), then whoever pronounced a curse for having sex with his sister must have brought a curse upon himself since he effectively curses Abraham for bedding down his sister Sarah!

What the composer of Genesis does with the story of Honest Abe and pharaoh is to dig Christians into a deeper pit since in James 2:21 Abraham is noted as having gained his salvation by his actions: "Was not Abraham our father justified by works?" James' question is rhetorical since in Genesis 26:5 Yahweh tells us that Abe was justified by his actions: "Because that Abraham obeyed my voice, and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws." Of the other hand all this is in direct contradiction to the Christian teaching that no one is justified by works, and that salvation is only obtainable through faith in Jesus Christ. (Ephesians 2:8,9, Titus 3:5-7) Ephesians 2:8,9 is contradicted, of course, in James 2:14! But that's another story that must await the telling when we drop into the New Testament for a visit.

Getting back to the incest thing, this author will be fair and mention that inerrantists have created some loopholes to protect their hero. To show that Abe wasn't lying about Sarah being his sister, they have concocted a bogus genealogy that shows Sarah to be Abe's cousin, and therefore fair game for the marriage bed. To give this an air of legitimacy they then do one of those "how it could have happened" things wherein Abe's father, Terah, took in the children of his deceased brother (Sarah being one of these orphans) and thereby became the defacto father of Sarah ... bla, bla, bla. In Judaism, rabbinical literature has long ago asserted that Sarah was the niece of Abraham, being the daughter of his brother Haran. With that they declare that she is the same as Iscah, who was the daughter of Nahor, who was Abe's brother. (Gen 11:29) All we can say to that is cut the crap! Genesis 11 spells out the family relationship in no uncertain terms; and old Abe himself admits the truth in Genesis 20:12, after he once again lies about Sarah, hands her over to yet another king, Abimelech of Gerar, to be ravished.

In that pimping tale, Yahweh once again comes to Abe's rescue. Gen 20:

3 But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night, and said to him, Behold, thou art but a dead man, for the woman which thou hast taken; for she is a man's wife. 4: But Abimelech had not come near her: and he said, lord, wilt thou slay also a righteous nation? 5: Said he not unto me, She is my sister? and she, even she herself said, He is my brother: in the integrity of my heart and innocency of my hands have I done this.6: And God said unto him in a dream, Yea, I know that thou didst this in the integrity of thy heart; for I also withheld thee from sinning against me: therefore suffered I thee not to touch her. 7: Now therefore restore the man his wife; for he is a prophet, and he shall pray for thee, and thou shalt live: and if thou restore her not, know thou that thou shalt surely die, thou, and all that are thine.

First of all, this tale brings to mind the observation that if you talk to God you're considered normal in our society; but if God talks back to you, then you're considered insane! Well, God talking to Abimelech isn't the only insane thing here. As in the tale of Abe & pharaoh, in Abimelech we have a truly honest, upright man, while in Abraham, God's righteous prophet, we clearly see the scoundrel that he was! But we already knew this. Getting past the morality question in both the tales of Abe's pimping, we are left with the question of Sarah's age.

The fact is that by the time of the Abimelech incident, Abraham was nearly 100 years old and Sarah was about 90 (see Gen 17:17 for the age difference). Indeed, in Gen 18:11 we read, "Now Abraham and Sarah were old and well stricken in age; and it ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. 12: Therefore Sarah laughed within herself, saying, After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?" Okay, granted that old Abe might have thought Sarah a beautiful 90-year-old babe, but why any man in his right mind, with good eyesight and below the age of 100, would have lusted after a 90 year old woman "well stricken with age" and would have given away the wealth that Abimelech handed over to Honest Abe is beyond belief! The same holds true in the story of pharaoh, although at that time Sarah was a "young" 65 year old!

As for Honest Abe's second bout of lying and pimping, this author isn't the only who has found the issue bothersome. In the Jerusalem Bible we find this bullshit excuse: "The purpose of this narrative ... is to commemorate the beauty of the ancestress of the race, the astuteness of its patriarch, the protection that God afforded them. The story reflects a stage of moral development when a lie was still considered lawful under certain circumstances and when the husband's life meant more than his wife's honour. God was leading man to an appreciation of the moral law but this appreciation was gradual."

John Skinner, writing for the International Critical Commentary: A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis (2nd ed. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956, p. 249.), states "lastly, it is assumed that in the circumstances lying is excusable."

The saints preserve us! (No. I'm not Irish, but I've always wanted to say that!) Did Skinner and the editors of the Jerusalem Bible forget about all the biblical rhetoric about Abraham and faith here? Honest Abe had God's promise that he would be made into a great nation one day and that all the nations of the earth would be blessed therein, so where was his faith in his god? But even worse, are Skinner & Co. saying that God's concept of morality was evolving from the time of Adam and Eve—that he had yet to refine right and wrong? If that is indeed the case, then everything from the Garden of Eden to the time of Honest Abe paints a picture of a homicidal schizophrenic deity on the loose!

Abe's pimping his wife on at least two occasions is just the tip of the iceberg. In Genesis 16 we read about Sarah handing over her "handmaid" Hagar to Abe so that he could rape the girl. The excuse for this bit of debauchery was Sarah's inability to conceive. We can only imagine Honest Abe's reaction when his tired old wife offered her young slave girl for a rape fest, and we can only imagine the horror the young Hagar must have felt at being ravished by an old dried up prune like Abrahah! At any rate, the bible assures us that 85-year-old Abe raped and impregnated the girl (Gen 16:16), although given what we now know from modern medical research (that the older a man gets, the less sperm he produces), we have to wonder if he was indeed the father. Personally, this author would look around for one of Abe's young, handsome shepherd boys as the father of Ishmael, the son whom Hagar allegedly bore to the old pimp Abraham. Maybe this thought crossed Abe's mind as well, since when his jealous wife later ran Hagar out of the house, Abe didn't raise a finger to help—except to give Hagar one measly skin of water and a dry loaf of bread before sending her and Ishmael into the widerness.

Now surely you're wondering where the Lord was during this last bout of Abe's immoral behavior. Well, god knows where he was, but when he did show up on the scene his only intervention was to save Hagar and Ishmael from death in the widerness wherein Sarah and Abe had driven them.

Once again sidestepping the question of Abe's morals and his homicidal remedy in ridding himself of Hagar and Ishmael, let's nitpick here by reading Genesis 21:14-15 in the NRSV: "So Abraham ... took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Be'er-she'ba. When the water in the skin was gone, she cast {Heb. shalak} the child under one of the bushes." By doing some simple math we find that Ishmael was a whopping 15 or 16 year teen when Abe drove him into the wilderness and his potential death. So how in hell could his mother—unless she was built like a Clydesdale horse—carry him on her shoulders into the wilderness? How could she have fulfilled God's instructions when he told her in Gen 21:18 to "lift up the lad, and hold him in your hand"?

Naturally these verses have sent the how-it-could-have-happened crowd into fits prompting all kinds of excuses. We won't delve into those here, since the Internet and bible commentaries are filled with such things. We'll just toss the matter onto the heap of problems already piling up and suggest to the reader that they consider it as part of the whole in their final analysis.

Circumcision

Well, with the Hagar-Ishmael thing we got ahead of our story. A year or two before that came to pass, the Lord decided that Honest Abe was the kind of man he needed for a special job—building a nation of "holy" people to serve the needs of the elohim (read gods here). It's at this point that the Lord makes a covenant with Abe: Gen 17:1:

And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect. 2 And I will make my covenant between me and thee, and will multiply thee exceedingly.... 10 This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised. 11 And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you. 12 And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed. 13 He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised: and my covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant.

Forgetting the covenant for a moment, let's notice in the above that the supreme loving "father" of humanity expressly condones slavery. This is why the ancient rabbis condoned it, it's why Christian ministers by the thousands condoned it, and why the world has suffered through thousands of years of such horror. On the other hand it's not hard to understand why this was written into the bible since the world in which the ancient Jewish scribes wrote Genesis was a world awash in slavery. It was a way of life and a way of business and I'm sure no small number of the Tanakh's composers were slave owners!

Okay. So free, bond and slave alike was to be circumcised if they belonged to the tribe of Abraham. What raises the old eyebrow here is the fact that the rite of circumcision predated the alleged time of Abraham and was routine in so-called ancient pagan nations. In fact, the oldest recorded account of circumcision is from an Egyptian tomb of Saqqara, near Memphis, when sometime around bce 2400 an artist carved the image of a temple priest circumcising two noblemen.⁵⁷ The significance of that discovery is that by bce 2400 Egypt was a well advanced civilization, which means the religious rite depicted on the tomb of Saqqara surely represents a long-established tradition. (This is partly confirmed from ancient Egyptian circumcised corpses which date to bce 4000.)⁵⁸

What all this means is that the rite of circumcision came to the ancient Hebrews by way of their worshiping pagan gods and myths, and by the time Genesis was being refined within Rabbinical Judaism the rite had to be explained. The most effective explanation was to tie it to Yahweh and Abraham, the mythical founder of Israel. Right. Well, let's look at what the rite of circumcision meant to the pre-Hebrew peoples of the bible.

As regards the bible, the foremost fact is (to repeat this again) that the rite of male circumcision predates recorded human history. When someone does finally note it, circumcision surfaces in ancient Egyptian tomb depictions in the Sixth Dynasty (2345-2181 bce), and the actual deed has been found on some Egyptian mummies dating back to 4,000 bce. As to the why of the procedure, it would seem that the rite represented a sacrificial castration proving an adherent's dedication to the mother goddess.⁵⁹ Indeed, the mother goddesses of Mesopotamia is the key to understanding circumcision in the bible. In her book The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets article "castration," Barbara Walker offers some insight on that point:

The institution of circumcision was attributed to the same gods, such as El, who castrated their fathers. Its object was to feminize. In India, boys were dressed as girls, nose ring and all, on the eve of the circumcision ceremony. In ancient Egypt also, boys on their way to circumcision wore girls' clothing, and were followed by a woman sprinkling salt, a common Egyptian symbol of life-giving menstrual blood.

Circumcision took place at the age of thirteen, the number of months in a year according to ancient menstrual calendars, and the traditional age of menarche. After copying circumcision from the Egyptians, Jews transferred it to the period of infancy, leaving the pubertal ceremony, now called bar mitzvah awkwardly placed at a point in a boy's life when nothing really happens, in contrast to the sudden onset of menarche in a girl. Infant circumcision was attributed to Moses, who insisted on it against the will of his Midianite wife Zipporah, who apparently objected to the mutilation of her infant. After performing the operation, she flung the foreskin at Moses's feet, calling him a bloody husband (Exodus 4:25).

Other biblical passages show that foreskins were considered appropriate offerings to Yahweh. David brought his wife Michal from Yahweh's representative the king, with 200 Philistine foreskins (1 Samuel 18:27). Other heavenly fathers made similar demands for genital gifts. Male animals sacrificed to Rome's Heavenly Father Jupiter were gelded. The bull representing the castrated savior Attis was also castrated.

When the ancient Israelites were being weaned away from the religious superstitions of Canaan, one of the first things to go was the worship of the mother goddess. Although she was known by a dozen or more names throughout the Middle East, the ancient Israelites worshiped her under the name of Lilith. Later rabbinical tradition places Lilith in the Garden of Eden as the first woman (you remember—the woman God forgot about when he said it wasn't good for man to be alone and then created Eve from Adam's rib). Anyway, Lilith was written in as the supreme bitch in Hebrew mythology, and it becomes patently obvious that she was simply used to wean Jews off mother goddess worship during the Babylonian Captivity. (Lilith, by the way, was another Sumerian/Babylonian myth borrowed by the ancient Judahites! See Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis by Robert Graves and Raphael Patai. New York: Doubleday, 1964, pp 65-69.)

Concerning circumcision itself, medical science completely invalidates the biblical command when it discovered the purpose of a foreskin and its necessity for a healthy developing penis during the first years of a boy's life. This is outlined in the following brief excerpt from Debra S. Ollivier's research:

It doesn't take much to realize that nature didn't intend the foreskin and the penis to be separated at birth. Try retracting the foreskin of a newborn's penis and you're struck by the steadfast, tenacious grip it has on the glans, or head. The foreskin is sealed to its bounty like a silo, and only slowly, over the years, yields to full retractability. But it's far more than just a sheath. The foreskin contains thousands of highly sensitive sensory receptors called Meissner corpuscles, which are more abundant there than in any other part of the penis. Richly endowed with a profusion of blood vessels, it also has a ridged band of peripenic muscles that protects the urinary tract from contaminants, and an undersurface lined with mucocutaneous tissue found nowhere else on the body, which contains ectopic glands that produce natural emollients and antibacterial proteins similar to those found in mother's milk. With its frenar ridges and its thousands of nerve endings, the foreskin not only protects the glans, which in an intact male is extremely sensitive, it also accounts for roughly one-third of the penis' sexual perceptivity. In short, evolution has seen to it that the penises of all mammals come protected in a remarkably fine-tuned and responsive foreskin.... Dr. Hiram Yellen, one of the two inventors of the Gomco Clamp, a tool used in circumcision, describes the standard procedure for circumcision in the following passage: '... the prepuce is put on a stretch by grasping it on either side of the median line with a pair of hemostats. No anesthesia is used. A flat probe, anointed with Vaseline, is then inserted between the prepuce and the glans ... In cases where the prepuce is drawn tightly over the glans, a dorsal slit will facilitate applying the cone of the draw stud (the bell) over the glans. After anointing the inside of the cone, it is placed over the glans penis ... The prepuce is then pulled through and above the bevel hole in the platform and clamped in place. In this way the prepuce is crushed against the cone causing hemostasis. We allow this pressure to remain five minutes, and in older children slightly longer. The excess of the prepuce is then cut with a sharp knife.' Within minutes, three feet of veins, arteries and capillaries, 240 feet of nerves and more than 20,000 nerve endings are destroyed; so are all the muscles, glands, epithelial tissue and sexual sensitivity associated with the foreskin. Finally, what nature intended as an internal organ is irrevocably externalized.⁶⁰

Why would an all-knowing creator, who supposedly brought into existence a perfect creation and declared it "good", require such a destructive, barbaric mutilation on a new-born baby? For those religionists who like to toss out feeble excuses, such as cancer prevention (which is medically unproven) and hygiene, then I say you are admitting an imperfection in the prototype and the god who supposedly created him! The rite of circumcision is pagan in origin and was practiced by numerous peoples in the Near and Middle East, and the Judeans, who are on record as practicing numerous pagan customs, were no different than their Canaanite brothers. Indeed, to connect this custom to its origins, notice in Joshua 5:2-3, where Yahweh commands Joshua to "make yourself flint knives and squat down and circumcise the people of Israel." The Egyptians also circumcised grown men with flint knives, who squatted in groups for the rite; and the mention of the rite being performed on a hill is significant because a hill, or high place, was paramount in the worship of all pagan deities. (See this author's study of phallic worship for the details of both pagan and Israelite phallic worship in the article Bible Legends, Sticks & Stones.) By the way, after all the hype about circumcision, and how it was an everlasting covenant (Gen 17:7, 10-11), Galatians 6:15 assures us that is of no consequence!

Getting back to Abraham, in Genesis 18:1 we find a surprising visit: "And the LORD appeared unto him [Abraham] in the plains of Mamre: and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day; 2 And he lift up his eyes and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground, 3 And said, My Lord, if now I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant: 4 Let a little water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree: 5 And I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts; after that ye shall pass on: for therefore are ye come to your servant. And they said, So do, as thou hast said. 6 And Abraham hastened into the tent unto Sarah, and said, Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth. 7 And Abraham ran unto the herd, and fetcht a calf tender and good, and gave it unto a young man; and he hasted to dress it. 8 And he took butter, and milk, and the calf which he had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree, and they did eat. 9 And they said unto him, Where is Sarah thy wife? And he said, Behold, in the tent."

First of all the lord himself was in the party of men who appeared at Abe's tent door, so then why was he asking of Sarah's whereabouts? I mean, Psalm 44:21, Job 42:2, Proverbs 15:3, Jeremiah 23:24, Acts 1:24, Jeremiah 16:17 and Hebrews 4:13 all assure us that Yahweh knows everything—that nothing is hid from him! This is one of those classical bible inconsistencies! Anyway, since we've already covered this, we'll skip over the rest of the tale, which is where Yahweh tells Abe and Sarah that they will be the proud parents of a baby boy.

In the next phase of his earthly visit (after their picnic of beef and bread under Abe's shade tree) Yahweh decides to "go down" to Sodom and Gomorrah to see for himself what the hell was happening there. This is an odd statement considering that Prov 15:3, Jer 16:17, 23:24-25 and Heb 4:13 assures us that Yahweh is everywhere, sees everything and that nothing is hidden from his view. Oh well. Genesis 18 finds Yahweh (spelled lord in the story, which, again, is the KJV English translation of Yahweh) and his two angel companions turning their faces towards Sodom and Gomorrah.

Hey, before proceeding, let's wonder about those infallible bible verses wherein Yahweh declares that no one can see his face and live, such as we find him telling Moses in Exd 33:20: "Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live." Hmmm ... do you suppose that the god who cannot lie and who does not change, changed his mind when he went calling on Abe, or do you think he lied to Moses? I mean, there he sat with Abe and Sarah in the shade of their tree—bare faced! The same observation can be made in with the story of him wrestled with Jacob in Genesis 32:30: "And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved." Something isn't quite right here! Someone is lying!

Okay. Well, Genesis 18:23 begins the story of Abe bargaining with Yahweh to spare Sodom and Gomorrah. I think you all know the story. He keeps at it until he get Yahweh to promise he'll not destroy the cities if he can find just ten righteous men therein: 18:32 "And he said, Oh let not the LORD be angry, and I will speak yet but this once: Peradventure ten shall be found there. And he said, I will not destroy it for ten's sake. 33 And the LORD went his way, as soon as he had left communing with Abraham: and Abraham returned unto his place." Now the laugh was on old Abe since Yahweh, who knows everything, already knew that there wasn't ten righteous men in Sodom and Gomorrah!

Hey, if you wanted action back in Old Testament times, then Sodom and Gomorrah was the place to go—which is probably why Abraham's nephew, Lot had moved there! Come one, come all, it was all happening in S & G! Of course where there are people having fun, there's sin, and fun and sin equals a pissed off god—that is if he's not sanctioned it! The problem here is that since there was no ten commandments back then, who knows exactly what displease the All-Merciful One? At any rate, he wasn't happy and determined to nuke every living thing in S & G.

Apparently the Lord went back to heaven when he left Abe's house, since we find his two angel companions arriving alone in Sodom and Gomarrah. We pick the story up in Genesis 19:1-11:

The two angels came to Sodom in the evening; and Lot was sitting in the gateway of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them, and bowed down with this face to the ground. He said, 'Please, my lords, turn aside to your servant's house and spend the night, and wash your feet; then you can rise early and go on your way.' They said, 'No, we will spend the night in the square.' But he urged them strongly; so they turned aside to him and entered his house; and he made them a feast, and baked unleavened bread, and they ate. But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house; and they called to Lot, 'Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may know them.' Lot went out of the door to the men, shut the door after him, and said, 'I beg you, my brothers, do not act so wickedly. Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof. But they replied, 'Stand back!' And they said, 'This fellow came here as an alien (Lot was not originally from Sodom), and he would play the judge! Now we will deal worse with you than with them.' Then they pressed hard against the man Lot, and came near the door to break it down. But the men inside reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them, and shut the door. And they struck with blindness the men who were at the door of the house, both small and great, so that they were unable to find the door.

Now you've read it—one of the most infamous tales in the whole of the Old Testament/Tanakh—so infamous that the tale of S & G added the word "sodomy" to the English language, and is used to by rabbis, priests and minsters to denounce the "sin" of homosexuality. But we're going to skip this controversial subject here since this author has thoroughly covered the details in his booklet Jehovah Finally Comes Out of the Closet! Here we're going to focus on some peculiarities. First, let's wonder why a righteous man like Lot would want to live among the debauched men of Sodom, unless he was a closet gay? Second, let's notice that every man in Sodom surrounded Lot's house, which means that Sodom must have been a very small town or Lot must have lived in a ten acre palace with a door that one could drive a 747 through! Second, Lot isn't concerned with the men's proposed act of raping his two guests, but on a point of etiquette, which is their violation of the ancient custom of hospitality! Third, when Lot offered his virgin daughters to the the entire male population of Sodom for a rape orgy he would have effectively been sacrificing them to outright murder! None of this seemed to be a problem for Yahweh's holy angels. They only reacted when the Sodomites went after Lot with the same threats or homosexual rape.

Now folks, here we have another disgusting sexual story involving God's holy servants in which a question of morals doesn't even enter the picture! I mean, this character Lot is the "righteous" man whom God is going to spare from his intended destruction of Sodom—the same man who later gets drunk and is raped by his two virgin daughters; the same man who produces a son named Moab via that incestuous rape who becomes the ancestor to both King David and Jesus Christ! Something smells to high heaven here, not the least of which is that a man more than willing to turn his daughters over to a mob for gang rape strongly indicates a father who would have willingly participated in incestuous copulation with those same daughters—drunk or not!

We shall overlook the tale of Yahweh turning Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. Surely to god no logical person can possibly accept such obvious myth as reality. The only comment necessary is to note that Yahweh killed the poor woman for turning to look one last time on Sodom where her older children and grandchildren were being nuked by him, but spared a bastard like Lot, who thence went out, got drunk and "did" his two daughters!⁶¹ Indeed, truly it is said that mysterious are the ways of the Lord!

Gen 22:1:

And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am. 2 And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

Here we have one of those tales that religionists will cite as an example of Abraham's righteousness via his willingness to offer his only begotten son to his god. (By the way, Genesis 16:15, 21:1-3 and Gal 4:22 tell us that Abraham had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac, whereas Hebrews 11:17 declares that Abraham had only one son. Which is right?) But what I find incredible is that Abe argued and bargained with the Lord for the safety of the men of Sodom and Gomorrah, but doesn't offer a peep on behalf of his doomed son! Of course Christians will defend by claiming that the tale is a forerunner to sacrifice God made when he gave his only begotten son as a sacrifice for humanity's sins. How sanctimonious! But what Christians fail to discuss is the blatant pagan connotations this tale suggests, not the least of which is the countless myths of pagan gods sacrificing their only begotten sons for the sins of humanity. (This author has covered the details of this history in his New Testament study.)

Long before the time of Abraham it was the practice of ancient pagans to worship their gods and goddesses on the hills, under a green tree (in the ancient mystery religions the hill symbolized the mother-goddess, and a tree the phallus of the god). Notice in Gen 21:33 that Abraham's worship of Yahweh involved a green tree: "And Abraham planted a grove in Beersheba, and called there on the name of the lord, the everlasting God." Strong's Concordance gives this definition of "grove": "815. 'eshel, ay'-shel; from a root of uncert. signif.; a tamarisk tree; by extens. a grove of any kind:—grove, tree." (This meaning is upheld in The New Brown-Driver-Briggs-Gesenius Hebrew-English Lexicon.) In Genesis 13:18 we find Abraham worshiping under an oak tree, which is a tree that has such strong pagan symbolism that the translators of the King James Version mistranslated the Hebrew word "elown" (Strong's #436) as "plain" to hide the meaning: "Then Abram removed his tent, and came and dwelt in the plain of Mamre, which is in Hebron, and built there an altar unto the lord." More honest translations, such The New American Standard Bible offers the verse correctly: "Then Abram moved his tent and came and dwelt by the oaks* of Mamre, which are in Hebron, and there he built an altar to the lord." (*Strong's #436.)

Not only does Abraham worship Yahweh under an oak tree, but (as we've already read in Genesis 22:1-2) this same Yahweh commands him to offer his son on a high place, or hill. Now in case you're historically ignorant of this fact, a significant number of Canaanite deities demanded the blood of first born children as sacrifices—the Semitic god Molech immediately coming to mind. This fact takes us back to the discoveries of Professor Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman showing that the ancient Israelites were nothing more than Canaanite hill people who were practically indistinguishable from their neighbors both in customs and religion. But ignoring this detail (hey, most Christian ministers do), let's wonder how this command can be justified in light of God's condemnation of pagans sacrificing their children to the heathen gods?

2 Kings 16:3: "But he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, yea, and made his son to pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the heathen, whom the lord cast out from before the children of Israel. 4 And he sacrificed and burnt incense in the high places, and on the hills, and under every green tree, and in Jer. 7:31: And they have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my heart."

Again, do we see in the Genesis tale of Abraham the adaptation of an ancient Semitic myth of a god named Abram and his sacrifice of his only begotten son at the spring equinox on a high place? To shed light on this question, let's consider the god Brahma. Like Abram, he had a sister-wife named Shri—a name that is, idiomatically speaking, almost identical with Sarai, Abram's wife-sister. Perhaps this puzzle will fit better when you learn that ancient Mesopotamian myth often include gods who marry their sisters, making their sons products of incest—sons that often are offered as sacrifices!

Interestingly enough, the god Brahma can be traced directly to Babylon and a god known as Abu-ramu. The editors of The Catholic Encyclopedia comment on this: "The original form of the name, Abram, is apparently the Assyrian Abu-ramu. It is doubtful if the usual meaning attached to that word 'lofty father', is correct."⁶² Of interest to this study is that "Abr-ramu" has been connected to the moon god or Ur, and Sarai to the moon goddess Istur, who had a title of "Sarratu" or "queen," and who was the wife of the moon god. In other words, in the very locale where we find Abram and Sarai (Abraham and Sarah), we find the legend of a much older Abu-ramu and Sarratu! Indeed, mythologists have connected Abraham's father "Terah," to the Babylonian "Terakhu," who was also connected to moon worship. Considering that so much of Babylon's mythology surfaced in Genesis, it seems hardly likely that all this is simple coincidence.⁶³

Throughout the study we have been referring to the god of the Old Testament-Tanakh as "Yahweh," which is the agreed upon translation of the Hebrew yhwh, or Tetragrammaton. Perhaps this is the place to point out that "yah" is the name of several pagan Canaanite deities, such as Yareah, the Canaanite moon god. The god Yahweh (yhwh) was the consort of the Canaanite mother goddess Anat. Additionally, "Jahi" (or Yahi) was an ancient goddess in Persian mythology, who seduces the first man, gave her menstrual "blood of life" to the first woman, and then later mated with the primal serpent.⁶⁴ Since we've already seen archeological proof that ancient Israelites were simply Canaanites who developed their own peculiar religion from elements of the far older mystery religions, then here we are seeing the origin of the famous Yahweh/Jehovah, in whose name so much blood, death and destruction has been wrought.⁶⁵

For What It's Worth: The Rest of Genesis

From the tales of Honest Abe the Genesis composers introduce us to the other patriarchs of Israel: Isaac, Jacob and his twelve sons. First of all, let's note that Isaac was a product of a brother/sister union making his parents father/uncle, mother/aunt; and that Isaac married his first cousin Rebekah. Even though this author has been repeatedly told that this was the way things were done in "bible days," I say that the Abraham family sounds "incestuous" to any sane ears. Okay. In an instance that seems like the composers ran out of material to plagiarize, in Genesis 25:20, 26:6-14 we find a story very similar to that of Abraham when he lies and pimps Sarah to two different kings in order to save his life.

In a virtual repeat of the tale of Abe, Sarah and King Abimelech of Gerar, Isaac and his wife Rebekah traveled to Gerar. And so, this inbred couple found themselves in Gerar and "when the men of the place asked him of his wife, he said, 'She is my sister,' for he was afraid to say, 'She is my wife,' because he thought, 'Lest the men of the place kill me for Rebekah, because she is beautiful to behold'"

Reality check here: Abimelech must have been ancient by this time, since it had been 40 years since he had lusted after Isaac's mother Sarah. It seems unbelievable that he was still on the throne of Gerar, and even if he were, it's doubtful that he would have any dealings with Abe's boy after what he had suffered at the hands of that wonderful old man. At any rate, the long and short of it all is that Isaac was caught in his lies and Yahweh blesses him with a "hundredfold" wealth increase. The almost identical stories have raised numerous questions among biblicists about their inclusion in Genesis; but for this author it raises the question about Yahweh's morality. Later we are going to see that bearing false witness is among the top ten sins of the bible, but Yahweh apparently had no problem with it when dealing with his chosen ones in pre-Mosaic times, nor does he have problems with lies throughout the rest of the bible! In fact, this is crystal clear in the tale of Jacob lying to (and cheating) both his father and brother Esau in Genesis 27.

That tale starts by Jacob swindling his brother out of his birthright, and then lying to his father in order to steal Isaac's blessing. However the implications go far beyond a liar and thief, since not only did Yahweh honor Jacob's blatant theft, in Genesis 25:23 we find that he had pre-approved this shameful episode.

After his theft, and fleeing the wrath of his brother, Jacob has his famous ladder dream at Beth-el (which means house of god). Genesis 28:12, 18-19: "And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it . . And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And he called the name of that place Bethel: but the name of that city was called Luz at the first. This part of the story seems okay, if it weren't for Genesis 35:11 where God talked to Jacob and, after God left, verse 14 says "And Jacob set up a pillar in the place where he talked with him, even a pillar of stone: and he poured a drink offering thereon, and he poured oil thereon. 15 And Jacob called the name of the place where God spake with him, Bethel." However, we read in Genesis 35:1: "And God said unto Jacob, Arise, go up to Bethel, and dwell there: and make there an altar unto God, that appeared unto thee when thou fleddest from the face of Esau thy brother." In Genesis 28 it is Jacbo who names Luz Bethel, whereas in 35:1 it is God [Elohim] who named Bethel, but in 35:15 it's Jacob again naming the place! Which is it? Which place is named Bethel, who named it, and at what time was it named?

This story is revealing for two reasons: Stories of heavenly ladders were featured in several pre-Mosaic pagan myths, such as in ancient Egypt: "Hail to thee, O Ladder of God, Hail to thee, O Ladder of Set. Stand up O Ladder of God, stand up O Ladder of Set, stand up O Ladder of Horus, whereon Osiris went forth into heaven."⁶⁶ This Egyptian tale is significant because 1) it predates the composition of Genesis by countless centuries and 2) because Set and Horus, two of ancient Egypt's most famous gods, were twin brothers who fought in the womb over who would become the leader of Egypt, as did Esau and Jacob as told in Genesis 25.⁶⁷

The second point about Jacob's dream is his anointing an upright stone in "honor" of his contact with Yahweh. Such a practice is a very ancient pagan custom, and has a most-vulgar representation. An upright pillar, usually planted on a hill top, represented the phallus of a deity planted within the earthen hill-womb of the mother-goddess. Any sexually active person can understand what "anointing" this phallic rock with oil symbolizes in such a context!⁶⁸

Without so much as a blush, the priests who inserted a pagan sex rite in the tale of Jacob went on to take the opportunity to plug a money-making advertisement in the story: "And this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God's house: and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee." (Gen 28:22) Come on here folks! What need does the creator of the universe have for tithes and offerings? The answer is NONE, but his priests sure as the hell did, just as do modern priests and ministers when they extort money from the faithful ignorant!

Okay, from phallic rocks, earthen wombs and lubricants, we follow Jacob into his mother's homeland, whence he had been sent because his racist father and mother didn't want him marrying outside his tribe. (Rachel was displeased because her son, Esau, had married among the local female population: Genesis 26:34: "And Esau was forty years old when he took to wife Judith the daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Bashemath the daughter of Elon the Hittite." The problem with this verse is that Genesis 36:2-3 contradicts it: "Esau took his wives of the daughters of Canaan; Adah, the daughter of Elon the Hittite, and ... Bashemath Ishmael's daughter." Both can't be right!) Now mama Rachel didn't send her favorite son to just any place, but to her own brother's home where Jake fell for his first cousin, who was closer relation than that if one scrutinizes the family history.

There should be no need to relive the details of how Uncle Laban cheated Jacob over the marriage contract with his two daughters, Leah and Rachel—it's one of the best-known stories in the Old Testament. The only comment needed here is that in the tale we discover where Jake came by his trademark dishonesty. However, what we don't hear in church is the fact that Jake, who wound up with two wives and two concubines (a biblical name for sex slaves), was in his early 80s when he began sexually doing four women—and this went on until he was 96! Now listen, either old Jake had discovered the fountain of youth in his mother's homeland, or we're being fed a big one! Of course, we could be fair and say that old age sexual prowess ran in the family, considering that Jake's grandpa Abe remarried after Sarah died and, at age 137, began begetting six more children. (Gen 25:1-2) In his article, Jacob an Old Geezer?, bible critic Farrell Till writes:

How can we know that Jacob was 83-96 years old when all this was happening? It is a matter of simple arithmetic. When Joseph presented his father to Pharaoh after the arrival of Jacob's family in Egypt, Jacob was 130: "Pharaoh said to Jacob, 'How many are the years of your life?' Jacob said to Pharaoh, 'The years of my earthly sojourn are one hundred thirty; few and hard have been the years of my life'" (Gen. 47:8-9). This age was confirmed later in the chapter, at the time of Jacob's death, when it was claimed that "Jacob lived in the land of Egypt seventeen years; so the days of Jacob, the years of his life, were one hundred forty-seven years" (v:28). So if we can determine the age of any of his sons at the time when Jacob was presented to Pharaoh, it would be possible to know how old he was when his sons were being born to him in Paddanaram. (The rest of Farell Till's article is posted at:
http://www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/1996/6/6geez96.html)

Speaking of Jake's dishonesty, he didn't leave this trait behind when he moved in with his uncle's family. In his next performance not only did Jake cheat his uncle-father-in-law, Laban, he did so with the help of an accomplice:

37 And Jacob took him rods of green poplar, and of the hazel and chestnut tree; and pilled white streaks in them, and made the white appear which was in the rods. 38 And he set the rods which he had pilled before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink. 39 And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstreaked, speckled, and spotted. 40 And Jacob did separate the lambs, and set the faces of the flocks toward the ringstreaked, and all the brown in the flock of Laban; and he put his own flocks by themselves, and put them not unto Laban's cattle. 41 And it came to pass, whensoever the stronger cattle did conceive, that Jacob laid the rods before the eyes of the cattle in the gutters, that they might conceive among the rods. 42 But when the cattle were feeble, he put them not in: so the feebler were Laban's, and the stronger Jacob's. 43 And the man increased exceedingly, and had much cattle, and maidservants, and menservants, and camels, and asses. 31:1 And he heard the words of Laban's sons, saying, Jacob hath taken away all that was our father's; and of that which was our father's hath he gotten all this glory. (Gen 30:37-43)

And so, Jake and the Lord teamed up and rustled Laban's sheep and goats, by which old Jake became rich. Maybe things were different in "bible days," but if Jake and Yahweh had pulled this off in today's society, they'd be jailed for fraud and grand theft! But the story doesn't end there. When a pissed off Laban came after Jake, the Lord stepped in to protect his protege. It was during that episode that we learn who and what Jake and family was worshiping, since Rachel had stolen her father's household gods (i.e., the elohim, or the same gods who are mentioned in Genesis 1:1—Strong's Concordance #430).

It is obvious from this story that the Jacob family had no problem with worshiping the gods of Canaan, or else Rachel would not have stolen them. This assertion is backed by Gen 35:1:

And God said unto Jacob, Arise, go up to Bethel, and dwell there: and make there an altar unto God, that appeared unto thee when thou fleddest from the face of Esau thy brother. 2 Then Jacob said unto his household, and to all that were with him, Put away the strange gods that are among you, and be clean, and change your garments: 3 And let us arise, and go up to Bethel; and I will make there an altar unto God, who answered me in the day of my distress, and was with me in the way which I went. 4 And they gave unto Jacob all the strange gods which were in their hand, and all their earrings which were in their ears; and Jacob hid them under the oak which was by Shechem.

Now the fact is that the bible does and then does not condemn one for worshiping other gods, the latter being made clear in Exodus 20:3, when he declares that "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." (The Lord is saying that you can have other gods, just don't put them before him!) Okay, so Jake hid the "strange" elohim under a sacred oak tree in Shechem. Obviously he did this to appease the supreme elohim, who was Yahweh. All this sounds good, except in Gen 31:54 we find that Jake and his uncle-father-in-law set up a phallic pillar stone on a high place, and joined together in a little penis worship. Whatever—who are we to question the way the patriarchs did things in "bible days?"

As Jacob nears his homeland he becomes fearful for his life at the hand of the brother he cheated twenty years before. This being foremost in his mind, he sends rich gifts before him, and last of all, places his unloved wife Leah and her children miles out front, putting them in danger of death. Not much of a hero, this old man Jake; and certainly he's not a man who had much faith in the Yahweh for whom he set up anointed phallic rocks over half of Canaan! Mayhap this is why the Lord himself decided to come down to earth on another of his rare visits (his third coming!):

Gen: 32:24: And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. 25 And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. 26 And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. 27 And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob. 28 And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed. 29 And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there. 30 And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.

Hey, there's no question of identity here: This beefy wrestler rolling around all night with Jake was the same "god" who walked in the cool of the day in Eden; the same one who sat in the shade of Abe's tent and ate a meal of roast beef! Moreover, Jake's comments provide us with another major biblical contradiction when he sees the Lord's face and lives! (See Exodus 33:20 "And he said [to Moses], Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.")⁶⁹ Of course aside from presenting us with a lie (one way or the other), this scripture also provides us with some insight into the Lord's sexual orientation.

With the mention that Jacob's "thigh" was thrown out of joint by God, we focus on the Hebrew word here, which is "yarek," and which is usually translated as "thigh" by the KJV translators. The reason for this is that the word is actually a euphemism for male genitalia. (See Strong's # H3409: "by euphem. the generative parts." Brown-Driver-Briggs-Genesis gives this meaning: "seat of procreative power.") All this fits the context of the tale because Jake required his wrestling partner to give him a blessing, and it was the custom for a man swearing an oath to place his hand "under the thigh" of the recipient (i.e., grasping a man's testicles). Of course, this custom was another borrowed detail for the Hebrew bible, since the swearing oaths by a man's genitalia predates the ot/Tanakh by untold centuries, which may be seen by an ancient carving of the Egyptian god Osiris swearing an oath while holding his penis.⁷⁰

After this godly wrestling match, the reason for which we are never told, God (Elohim) changes Jacob's name to Israel. This is an odd insertion because in Genesis 35:9-15 the same God (Elohim) again appears to Jacob at a place called Padanaram and informs him that he was changing his name from Jacob to Israel. Now one would think that the Omnipotent Lord of the universe would remember something he had done twice, but in Genesis 46:2 he appeared to "Israel" and, forgetting his new name, said: "Jacob, Jacob. And he [Jacob] said, Here am I."

God forgetting his name didn't seem to bother Israel in the least, because we read in Genesis 33:19 that: "he bought a parcel of a field, where he had spread his tent, at the hand of the children of Hamor, Shechem's father, for an hundred pieces of money. 20 And he erected there an altar, and called it Elelohe-Israel." Did you catch that? Israel/Jacob called this latest consecrated penis "the God (El) of Israel"! What a beginning for the twelve tribes of Israel!

The Jacob Family "Conquers" Egypt

Before discussing the Israelite captivity, we need to have some points clear about Jacob's twelve sons, from whom supposedly sprang the twelve tribes of Israel. The scholarly consensus is that these legendary twelve tribes are not descended from twelve literal sons of Jacob, but were a confederation of twelve Canaanite tribes, which eventually made up the kingdom of ancient Israel.⁷¹ The proof of this history can be found in the easy-to-read book by Professor Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, Archaelogy's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. We have already seen a number of references to that excellent work, but let's again review one particular quotation:

The world in which the Bible was created was not a mythic realm of great cities and saintly heroes, but a tiny, down-to-earth kingdom where people struggled for their future against the all-too-human fears of war, poverty, injustice, disease, famine and drought. The historical saga contained in the Bible—from Abraham's encounter with God and his journey to Canaan, to Moses' deliverance of the children of Israel from bondage, to the rise and fall of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah—was not a miraculous revelation, but a brilliant product of the human imagination. It was first conceived—as recent archaeological evidence suggest—during the span of two or three generations, about twenty-six hundred years ago [i.e. about 600 years before Jesus]. Its birthplace was the kingdom of Judah, a sparsely settled region of shepherds and farmers, ruled from an out-of-the way royal city precariously perched in the heart of the hill country on a narrow ridge between steep, rocky ravines.

During a few extraordinary decades of spiritual ferment and political agitation toward the end of the seventh century bce, an unlikely coalition of Judahite court officials, scribes, priests, peasants, and prophets came together to create a new movement. At its core was a sacred scripture of unparalleled literary and spiritual genius. It was an epic saga woven together from an astonishingly rich collection of historical writings, memories, legends, folk tales, anecdotes, royal propaganda, prophecy, and ancient poetry. Partly an original composition, partly adapted from earlier versions and sources, that literary masterpiece would undergo further edition and elaboration to become a spiritual anchor not only for the descendants of the people of Judah but for communities all over the world.⁷²

The inclusion of a legendary hero/ancestor's founding a great dynasty/empire in Genesis, was another attempt by the Tanakh's composers to compete with the more-sophisticated nations of the ancient world, all of which claimed descent from a legendary hero/ancestor (or god). Hence, on nothing more than ink and parchment, the legend of Israel was born.

However, the number of Jacob's sons was no coincidence. The number twelve is a magical number in ancient mythology, especially that of ancient Egypt and Babylonia, from which the authors of Genesis heavily borrowed. For instance, ancient Egyptian holy writings mention the twelve sons of the god Ra, and many of the ancient pagan savior-gods had twelve disciples, as supposedly did Jesus. But the most important usage of the number twelve is found in the twelve houses of the Zodiac—an important religious concept in the ancient Babylonian mysteries. Indeed, so important was the Babylonian Zodiac, that in coming centuries it was refined for usage in the ancient mystery religions of Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome and Judea-Canaan.

There is no dispute that the ancient Judahites adopted aspects of the Zodiac since its influence is found in primitive Judaism. In fact, a good deal of the Babylonian Zodiac survives today as the cornerstone of Jewish Kabbalism. In this brief summery, Kabbalist Joseph-Mark Cohen explains the Kabbalah's importance:

The primary astrological story in the Book of Genesis is the story of the twelve sons of Jacob (and his daughter, Dinah). These twelve tribes of Israel most certainly represent the twelve constellations or twelve signs of the zodiac. The discussion as to which tribe relates to which sign has been entered into by many biblical commentators and more than a few kabbalists.... The kabbalah has been alive and vibrant for over 3,000 years within the Sephardi branch of Judaism in Morocco, Spain, Egypt, Yemen, Iran, Turkey and Israel. Astrology has been a vibrant aspect of Jewish mysticism and daily life for at least this long. 3 (Cohen's mention of the Sephardim is particularly revealing since they are the only living Jews who might possibly have a racial connection to the ancient Judahites mentioned in the Tanakh. The Ashkenazi Jews, who comprise the majority of today's Jews, are descended from Gentile East European Khazars, who converted to Judaism en-masse in the eight century ce.)

This brief outline is not meant as a comprehensive study of Babylonian astrology and its undercurrent within the Tanakh. It is meant to inspire the serious researcher to undertake a thorough examination of the subject on their own. Its brief mention here is to help lay a foundation for the serious flaws that continue to unfold as we look at Genesis.

Taking the story of Jacob and his twelve sons at face value, let's notice that some of Jacob's sons were products of rape, by which is meant that Jacob impregnated his wives' slaves—obviously with the tacit approval of Yahweh.⁷³ (The word "rape" is used since we could hardly expect slave girls to willingly give themselves to sexual intercourse with a man in his 80s-90s!) The anonymous authors of Genesis tell us that the twelve were named Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph and Benjamin, which we find enumerated in Genesis 35:22-26. However, whoever wrote Revelation 7 didn't seem to know about Dan, instead substituting the half tribe of Manasseh!

Anyway, among these twelve brothers was born a sister, named Dinah, whose name happens to be very similar to several pagan goddesses in the ancient world. And, just like tales found in several ancient pagan myths, Dinah was raped, for which her brothers took revenge by killing every male in the land of Shechem. The absurdity of the tale is revealed by noting the ages of the participants, which is accomplished by simple addition and subtraction.

First, let's remember that Jacob was in his 70s when he left his mother's home to go courting his cousin Rachel. By the time Joseph was born, Jacob was about 91 years old. To get an idea of the Jacob children's ages, which is particularly important to this story, we notice that Jacob worked for seven years for Leah (after which he wed her), and, after another week, he wed Rachel. Jacob worked another seven years for Rachel, then an additional six years for the sheep and goats he cheated from his father-in-law, Laban (via some magical sticks). (See Genesis 31:41.) That's a total of twenty years, of which only thirteen years saw the production of children. But notice in Genesis 30:21, just before Jacob and Laban contract for the additional six years, that Dinah was born. Six years later, Jacob flees his father-in-law, which makes Dinah six years old at the time. Shortly after this, the Jacob family settles in the land of Shalem, where Dinah is "defiled" by the young prince, Shechem (who, oddly enough, is called an "honorable" man). Allowing some time for the travel, we can deduce that Dinah was about 7-8 years old when she was supposedly "defiled" and when the young prince wanted to marry her. This also means that her brothers, Simeon and Levi (if we deduct 7 years from the twenty years mentioned in Genesis 31:41), are well under 13 years old when they go on their revenge raid to slaughter all the grown men of Shechem!

So, we are left with this scenario: The seven-year-old Dinah so attracts the prince of Shechem, that he has sex with her. Then two of Dinah's pre-adolescent brothers (perhaps ten or eleven years old) attack the grown men of Shechem and not only do they slay them all, their other little brothers rustle the slain men's cattle, sheep and donkeys, steal all their wealth, enslave the dead men's wives and children, and herd them all back to their father's tent. That's quite an accomplishment for a band of little boys! (Genesis 34:25-29)

Now the kicker in all this is that according to God's infallible word, Shechem's actions were not wicked—in fact, he did act honorably: Exodus 22:16-17: "And if a man entice a maid that is not betrothed, and lie with her, he shall surely endow her to be his wife. 17 If her father utterly refuse to give her unto him, he shall pay money according to the dowry of virgins." So, what was Shechem's crime? Nothing—at least according to the all-wise, all-merciful Yahweh, who didn't lift a finger to stop the wholesale murders, thefts and enslavements by his godly servants! But such are the tales that make up the Tanakh, which actually makes a good preface for the story of Joseph in Egypt.

Joseph: a Story-of-Many-Colors

Genesis 37:3 tells us "Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age: and he made him a coat of many colours." Now that's a hell of a revelation about a father! He was a man with at least thirteen children and he played favorites, which (come to think of it) was a godly attribute since Yahweh himself plays favorites throughout the bible.

Let's have this clear: God Almighty is a respecter of persons, no matter what his word says to the contrary: Romans 2:11 "For there is no respect of persons with God."; Ephesians 6:9 "And ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him."; Colossians 3:25 "But he that doeth wrong shall receive for the wrong which he hath done: and there is no respect of persons."; James 2:9: "But if [you] have respect of persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors."; Acts 10:34-35: "Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons."

How do we know that God is indeed a respecter of persons, when his infallible word says he's not? For one thing his word clearly states in Exodus 2:25: "And God looked upon the children of Israel, and God had respect unto them." The Israelites were in good company, since Genesis 4:4, Leviticus 26:9, 2 Kings 13:23 and Psalm 138:6 also reports that Yahweh was a respecter of persons. Indeed, take a look at Romans 9:13: "even as it has been written, 'I loved Jacob, and I hated Esau.'" This refers to Malachi 1:2-3 where God names Esau as someone he hated. Why did the All-Wise One hate Esau? Was it because Esau was a incorrigible sinner? Hardly; it was simply to use Jacob's twin brother for his own purposes, as Romans 9:11 spells out: "Before the children had been born or had done anything good or bad, Rebekah was told that the older child would serve the younger one. This was said to Rebekah so that God's plan would remain a matter of his choice ... " (God's Word Translation) There are countless examples throughout both Old and New Testament where God damns people—individually and whole nations—for no other reason than they were destined to be cogs in the wheels of his plans. So arbitrary are God's reasons, that Paul had to pen some double talk in 1 Corinthians 2:9 to explain why we mere humans can't understand the ways of the Lord.

At any rate, this is some of the background to one of the most popular Old Testament stories ever—the tale of Joseph's brothers tossing him into a pit, and then later selling him into slavery (to Israel's near kinsmen, the Midianites, or Ishmaelites, depending on which scripture you care to believe, Genesis 37:36 or Genesis 39:1), and how Joseph then rose to be ruler of Egypt because he was a fortuneteller.

The only problem with the tale of Joseph is that it never happened! Like so much in Genesis, it is another example of Jewish scribes borrowing and embellishing the myths of their more-sophisticated neighbors. For instance, history tell us that an ancient Babylonian goddess named Nanshe was revered by both the Babylonian and Assyrian priesthood because she was believed to bestow the gift of divinatory interpretations of dreams, or oneiromancy.⁷⁴ To gain this gift, a priest was first lowered into a "pit," or "abaton," which was symbolic of the goddess's earth-womb. During an over-night stay in the pit, the initiate was supposedly visited by the "incubus," or the goddess's spirit, which bestowed the gift of oneiromancy. Afterwards, the high priest, or father, would award the initiate with a coat-of-many-colors as a sign of his rebirth into a holy life and signifying communion with the goddess under her oneiromantic title of "Interpreter of Dreams."⁷⁵

A similar ritual of the "pit," or "abaton," was known in other ancient myths. The Pythagorean philosopher, Thales of Miletus (bce 62?-546), one of the Seven Wise Men of the ancient world, supposedly derived his intellect by communion with the Goddess of Wisdom in abaton, or the "pit."⁷⁶ Indeed, the "pit" itself was significant in numerous ancient mythologies, such as in that of the Greek god Apollo, the famous solar deity of the ancient world. He is said to have ruled heaven during the day, and the underworld (abaton, or "pit") at night. The myth of Apollo and his "pit" was borrowed and corrupted into Abaddon by Jewish scribes and became Apollyon, or Spirit of the Pit, in Jewish mythology. In turn, Apollyon was borrowed by the Christians and used in their tales, notably in Revelations 9:11: "And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon."⁷⁷

So, not only was Joseph awarded a coat-of-many-colors by his father, he too was lowered in a pit by his brethren, after which his powers to interpret dreams gained him the rule of Egypt. Now notice in Genesis 44:2-5 where we find Joseph interpreting a dream with the aid of a silver cup: "Is not this it in which my lord drinketh, and whereby indeed he divineth?" This is significant because a silver cup was considered "moon-metal" and was the vessel of the same goddess who gave the gift to interpret dreams.⁷⁸ Besides all these obviously borrowed pagan myths in the story of Joseph, we find another problem with the tale.

The English word "divineth" is a translation from the Hebrew "nachash," which is Strong's #H5172, and which means "to hiss, i.e. whisper a (magic) spell; gen. to prognosticate:— X certainly, divine, enchanter, (use) X enchantment ..." This is a blatant contradiction to God's command in Leviticus 19:26: "Ye shall not eat any thing with the blood: neither shall ye use enchantment, nor observe times." The English word "enchantment" in this verse is translated from the same Hebrew word "nachash," which is Strong's #H5172, and which was used in Genesis 44 to describe Joseph's practice of witchcraft! To back this point, let's also notice Deuteronomy 18:10:

There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination [nachash:H5172], or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch (11) or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. 12 For all that do these things are an abomination unto the lord [Yahweh]: and because of these abominations the lord [Yahweh] thy God [Elohim] doth drive them out from before thee.

Either Yahweh sanctioned witchcraft in pre-Mosiac days, but changed his mind on Mt. Sinai, or Joseph was sinning, or the composers of Genesis didn't know that later scribes would pen such blatant contradictions!

As if all this pagan symbolism and scriptural contradiction isn't revealing enough, history tells us that there was a deified Egyptian pharaoh named Djoser, who reigned bce 2630-2611, who was associated with a seven-year famine along the Nile, and who had an advisor and second-in-command named Imhotep, whose attributes are quite similar to those of the biblical Joseph.⁷⁹ Pharaoh Ptolemy V records this poetic verse about the famine of Djoser's time: "My heart was in sore distress, for the Nile had not risen for seven years. The grain was not abundant, the seeds were dried up, everything that one had to eat was in pathetic quantities, each person was denied his harvest. Nobody could walk any more; the old people's hearts were sad and their legs were bent when they sat on the ground, and their hands were hidden away. Even the courtiers were going without, the temples were closed and the sanctuaries were covered in dust. In short, everything in existence was afflicted." After this prayer, Djoser makes an offering to the god Khnum, who then appears to him in a dream, promising, "I will cause the Nile to rise up for you. There will be no more years when the inundation fails to cover any area of land. The flowers will sprout up, their stems bending with the weight of the pollen."⁸⁰

Religionists insist that Djoser is the pharaoh of the Genesis Joseph story, and that his advisor Imhotep was none other than Joseph. What they overlook is that the Genesis account was penned some 2,200 years after Djoser lived, and they overlook the Jewish scribes' ugly record of plagiarism throughout their Genesis composition. In other words, just as they had done when they "borrowed" so many ancient Sumerian/Babylonian creation myths, the scribes of Ezra's day purloined this one from Egypt.

Okay; now that we have the origins clear, let's look at the Joseph tale as told in Genesis 37:9-10: "And he [Joseph] dreamed yet another dream, and told it his brethren, and said, Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me. And he told it to his father, and to his brethren: and his father rebuked him, and said unto him, What is this dream that thou hast dreamed? Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to thee to the earth?" In these two verses we have a clear reference to both the ancient Babylonian zodiac and to that nation's symbolism of a holy father and mother to the sun and moon!⁸¹

Also tucked into the story of Joseph is the tale of Judah taking a wife from among the Canaanites, and producing three sons, Er, Onan, and Shelah. Genesis 38:7: "And Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the lord; and the lord slew him. 8 And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother's wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother. 9 And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother. 10 And the thing which he did displeased the lord: wherefore he slew him also."

We are not told what wickedness Er committed to cause Yahweh to slay him, but it must have been a doosie of a crime since this same Yahweh, as we've seen, was not concerned in the least by the numerous past "sins" of the Abraham-Jacob family. As to Onan, overlooking the fact that Judah commanded him to impregnate his brother's wife, we are specifically told that his spilling his "seed" on the ground was what caused Yahweh's vengeance, which is a tale that has inspired countless debates among religionists.

One group contends that it was not Onan's "spilled seed" that caused Yahweh's deadly response, but his refusal to raise up children for his brother. If this is the case, then Yahweh contradicts his own command in Deut. 25:7-10: "And if the man like not to take his brother's wife, then let his brother's wife go up to the gate unto the elders, and say, My husband's brother refuseth to raise up unto his brother a name in Israel, he will not perform the duty of my husband's brother. 8 Then the elders of his city shall call him, and speak unto him: and if he stand to it, and say, I like not to take her; 9 Then shall his brother's wife come unto him in the presence of the elders, and loose his shoe from off his foot, and spit in his face, and shall answer and say, So shall it be done unto that man that will not build up his brother's house. 10 And his name shall be called in Israel, The house of him that hath his shoe loosed." And so, according to God's infallible word Onan's "crime" was punishable by being called loose shoe and having the offended woman spit in his face—which doesn't seem too drastic a penalty! However Yahweh, being the homicidal deity he was, wasn't content with calling Onan a "loose shoe," and killed him for spilling his seed!

Needless to say, bible thumpers have been and continue to be obsessed with sex, and demanding penalties for "abnormal" sexual behavior. And so, the above scripture is why most believe that Yahweh killed Onan for "spilling his seed" presumably on the floor of his tent. In turn this has brought the fanatical religious condemnation of both birth control and masturbation as horrific sins—pronouncements that have brought immeasurable suffering over the course of thousands of years!⁸² Indeed, so horrific was Onan's "sin" that his name has entered in the English language as "onanism," which is a euphemism for masturbation.

Well, the "sin" of masturbation may have aroused Yahweh to kill poor Onan, but he wasn't concerned in the least when Judah hired his daughter-in-law Tamar as an incestuous prostitute. Nor was he concerned when Judah fathered two sons in his whoredom, one of whom supposedly became the ancestor of king David and Jesus Christ.⁸³

Reading through the history of the Abraham family makes one wonder why Yahweh chose Noah's family, from among all those on earth, to save from the Flood? From the time Ham porked his drunken father, down through the tales of Abraham's pimping, his debaucheries with his wife's slave, Lot's incest with his daughters, through the sexual excesses of Jacob—including groping the Lord's privy parts in a wrestling match—to the incest of Judah and Tamar, we have one damned perverse history on our hands—and one which gets worse by the chapter!

The Jacob Family "Does" Egypt in Style!

Whatever you may have heard in church, or read in those little children's story books, Joseph, Jacob's 11th son—the first-born son of his beloved wife Rachel—was a real piece of work! That is to say, when you follow the story of Joseph in Genesis (chapters 37-50), it doesn't take an astute person long to discover that Little Joe was a bonafide jerk!

First of all, Genesis tells us that Little Joe was daddy's favorite. (This trait of favoring one son above the rest seems to have been a speciality in the Abraham family—without doubt a trait learned from the Lord himself.) This being the case, Joey was always spying on his brothers and reporting back to daddy any questionable behavior. Let's say that Dan and Simeon, after a hard day lounging about in the pastures, went out on the town. Let's say they picked up some local girls and drank a skin full of hootch and stayed out all night. By the time they came staggering in the next morning, there stood Daddy Jake and his favorite, Little Joe, who had snitched on them! Is it any wonder that Joey's brothers grew to hate the guy? It is any wonder that when daddy openly rewarded his favorite with the infamous coat-of-many-colors the other brothers' anger turned homicidal?

Things came to a head when Little Joe told his eleven brothers of his dreams, which were astrologically-laced drivel about the brothers falling on their faces before him. You all know the story, how Joe's eleven brothers subsequently tossed him in a pit and wound up selling him to some slave-trader Ishmaelite cousins of theirs who happened to be meandering past. This now raises one of our first questions about the Israelites.

The Lord, in all his wisdom, chose the Abraham family above all the families on earth for his special blessings. Why? Nothing in the behavior in the Abraham family, from Abe himself right down to the little snitch Joseph, makes us see why Yahweh should favor this bunch of incestuous, lying, backstabbing, conniving, idol worshiping, slave-owning, raping desert nomads above all the other families of the earth! But, since that's the family with which we're stuck, and since trying to get any straight answers from Christian apologists is like trying to win an argument with the IRS, we'll accept our fate and plod on.

While his cousins the Ishmaelites, or Midianites (which ever!) toted his hide to Egypt, Little Joe's brothers took his coat-of-many-colors back to daddy Jake with the sorrowful news that his favorite had been devoured alive by a wild beast. While the old man was mourning over this barefaced lie, Joe's cousins sold him for 20 pieces of silver to someone who had a name that sounded like a laxative.

An Egyptian named Potiphar, who was pharaoh's captain of the guard, became Joe's owner, but this was no coincidence. With the aid of the Lord, Little Joe soon took over Potipahr's household and was flying high in Egypt! But with the Lord on one's side, who needs enemies?

When Potiphar's wife decided to take Little Joe for a romp in her bed, and he refused, we are treated to the typical ending of a woman-scorned tale. Joe was accused of attempted rape and was tossed into the royal prison by his master. This punishment is a bit hard to swallow since a slave like Joseph, who had tried to rape his master's wife, would have hardly gotten off with a jail term—least of all in a royal prison! I mean, this was ancient Egypt where human life was cheap. If this tale were true, then Joseph would have been dog meat by the end of that day. But, let's concede that with God all things are possible, so let's keep going.

When the curtain opens on act two, Little Joe is sitting in jail, where (again thanks to the Lord) he caught the eye of the chief jailor and befriended pharaoh's former butler and baker, who were rotting as prisoners for some trifling offenses. Anyway, while whiling away the hours and contemplating God's blessings, Joe correctly interprets some dreams for his butler and baker friends. When his talent was eventually reported to pharaoh, who had been experiencing some disturbing dreams, Joe's fortunes were sealed. We all know what happened next: Little Joe was brought before pharaoh, correctly interpreted the old boy's disturbing dreams, and violà—pharaoh gave him the number two spot in the whole damned kingdom of Egypt—that and an Egyptian wife, Asenath, who was the daughter of a pagan priest!

I know it's not given to mere mortals to understand the mysterious ways of the Lord, but since his word does invite us to prove all things (1 Thes. 5:21), something about this part of the tale stinks to high heaven: Little Joe the snitch gets sold into slavery by his brothers, bought by a man whose wife tries to rape him, gets tossed into prison for his godliness, and comes out of this scene from hell as second only to pharaoh and ruler of all Egypt. Not only that, before he's through, Joe has pharaoh praising Yahweh! But none of this is why the tale stinks, even though it reeks of implausibility if not impossibility. The stink is because we find the omnipotent, omniscient puppet master Yahweh behind the scenes setting up not only Joseph, but the whole seed of Israel to be enslaved for the next 400+ years! Why would a "loving" god do this to his chosen ones?

In Deuteronomy 7:9 we read "Therefore know that the lord your God [Yahweh Elohim], He [is] God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations with those who love Him and keep His commandments; and He repays those who hate Him to their face, to destroy them. He will not be slack with him who hates Him; He will repay him to his face." In Deuteronomy 5:9 we read: "You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the lord your God [Yahweh Elohim], am a jealous God [elohim], punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 10 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments."

In the above we find a promise directly from God Almighty that he blesses a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments. Abraham, the father of faith and righteousness, was followed by Isaac, another godly saint who was followed by Jacob—one of God's all-time favorites—and lastly we have Joseph, a good, upright servant of the Lord (well, at least this is the biblical interpretation of their collective characters). What had any of these men done to have God break his promise to bless a thousand generations of their descendants? According to the inspired word of God they were blameless and died in the faith, which means we must accept that the Lord their God was an arbitrary creature whose idea of blessings include injustice, torment and death. This can be the only answer since we find God behind the scene busy drawing his net tight around Israel's doomed neck.

With the direct intervention of the Lord, who brought about a devastating famine on Egypt and its neighbors, Joseph grew extraordinarily rich on the backs of God's Egyptian victims. He became rich by taking both the starving Egyptians and their starving neighbors, for every ounce of copper, silver and gold, and every hoofed critter down to the last suckling lamb in exchange for a few miserable sacks of grain. Meanwhile, back in Canaan, the Lord was plotting to bring Joe's relations into the Egyptian trap.

In due course old Jacob and his eleven sons, their wives, children, flocks of sheep, goats and assess all showed up in Egypt where they settled on the choicest piece of real estate, which starving Egyptians had traded for food. In other words, one day a group of outsiders showed up in Egypt, took control of the nation, took advantage of a national catastrophe to rape the land of all its wealth, and then rubbed the face of the humiliated robbed Egyptians in the claim that it was due to the superiority of their god Yahweh over the gods of Egypt! We can be certain that this scene didn't win many friends among the Egyptian population!

When we pick up the story in the next installment of this study, we shall find that the Israelites had reaped the rewards of God's trap—four centuries of enslavement!

Conclusion of the Genesis Study

So what are my concluding remarks about the creation account of Genesis? I have none! But, I will tell you what I feel. I don't believe humanity is the product of some random natural force in the universe. I feel we are here by careful design and a supreme creative force. I feel that the conscience in us all is part of that force, and that we can connect to that force when all man-made and artificial barriers are dismantled and discarded in their proper place. I feel that there is a far more exciting human destiny than the bigoted avarice of some long-dead scribe's narrow-minded vision of God and the afterlife.

Endnotes

(1) Former Christian minister Farrell Till shows the nonsense of the standard explanation that the Hebrews used the plural word elohim when referring to their god Yahweh only to show awe and respect, by the following: "Jephthah said in his message to the king of the Ammonites during a dispute over territory the Israelites had taken on their way out of Egypt, 'Will you not possess that which Chemosh your elohim gives you to possess? So whomever Yahweh our Elohim has dispossessed from before us, them will we possess'(Judges 11:24). Since there were no capital letters in Hebrew to show the distinction the translators arbitrarily made in capitalizing elohim as it referred to Yahweh, it is obvious that Jephthah considered Chemosh of the Ammonites to be elohim in the same sense that Yahweh was the elohim of Israel. He was contending that Yahweh, his elohim, had given the Israelites certain territories just as Chemosh, the elohim of the Ammonites, had given them certain lands and that the two nations should therefore be content with the arrangements of their respective gods. Furthermore, we have to wonder at this point if Jephthah intended elohim as a 'plural of dignity' when he applied it to the singular deity Chemosh. If not, why not? If it expressed dignity and respect when applied to Yahweh, then why would it not mean the same when applied to another deity? So if there is any merit at all to the plural-of-dignity argument, we have in this passage a clear indication that Chemosh was considered a real god who deserved respect." (From Yahweh, The God of Gods found in the Skeptical Review, which is linked to this web site. URL: http://theskepticalreview.com/articles-idx.html)

(2) Dr. James Strong. Strong's Exhaustive Concordance with Hebrew and Greek Lexicon. First published in 1890, Strong's Concordance is one of the most widely used bible study tools in Christianity. Although it is woefully inadequate for the purpose of translating Hebrew and Greek, Dr. Strong's numbering system is very popular and usually applied in other Hebrew lexicons. The best Hebrew lexicon is The Brown Driver Briggs Gesinus Hebrew Aramaic English Lexicon. (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 1979)

(3) In Genesis 35:7 we read the story of Jacob building an altar at Bethel (which, in Hebrew, means house of god), because "there God was revealed to him." However, the Hebrew literally reads that the gods (ha-elohim) were revealed (niglu) to Jacob—the same "gods" who created the heavens and the earth in Genesis 1:1.

(4) See The JPS [Jewish Publication Society] Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991), volume 1, pp. 3-10. The editors openly acknowledge the presence of Babylonian legends in the Jewish Bible, specifically the Semitic legend of the battle by the high gods against the Great Mother, the dragon of the sea, who was the Chaos vanquished by the Lord. The Sumerians believed that the hoe, one of their basic agricultural tools, in the beginning was given as a gift of the gods. A myth was created explaining the circumstances of this event. It opens with the Sumerian creation of the world and of man. There are parallels to both the Bible's 1st creation story: "The Lord hastened to separate heaven from earth" (Gen. 1:6-10); "and Daylight shone forth" (Gen. 1:3-5); and the 2nd creation story: "The Lord put the (first) human in the brick mould, and Enlil's people emerged from the ground ..." (Gen. 2:7). MS in Sumerian on clay, Babylonia, 2000-1800 bce, 1 tablet, 8,1x6,5x2,7 cm, single column, 26 lines in cuneiform script. The Schoyen Collection.

(5) Franck, Adolphe. The Kabbalah: The Religious Philosophy of the Hebrews. Translated from the French. (New York: Bell Publishing Company, 1940), page 201. This conclusion, by the way, is backed by the majority of scholars.

(6) The Anchor Bible Genesis. Introduction, translation and notes by E. A. Speiser (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1964), p. 19. Important to this study is the fact that "Eden" is not a place, but a region. Researchers place its location near or in ancient Sumer, which was eventually conquered by the Akkadians and later the Babylonians.

(7) Coffin Text 160. Wright, J. Edward. Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 11.

(8) Note: For Hebrew definitions The New Brown-Driver-Briggs-Gesenius Hebrew and English Lexicon (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 1979) is used throughout.

(9) Mackenzie, Donald A. Mythology of the Babylonian People. Reprint of the 1915 edition entitled Myths of Babylonia and Assyria. (London: Braken Books, Random House, UK Ltd., 1996), pp. 145-149. A glimpse of this myth surfaces in Isaiah 14:12, where we read of about a god, whom some Christian scholars have declared was Satan, ascended to heaven to displace God—all of which is outlined in this author's Satan: the Lies, the Myths, the Human Tragedy.

(10) See Harwood, William N. Mythology's Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus. (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1992), and Stone, Merlin. When God Was A Woman (New York: Dorset Press, 1990), pp. xvi-xvii, for more information.

(11) The Mythology of All Races, vol. V, pp. 293-297. The Mythology of All Races is a thirteen-volume set edited by Canon John Arnott MacCulloch and the famous Christian doctor, George Foot Moore. Volume V was written by Stephen Herbert Langdon, a professor (in 1931) of Assyrology at Jesus College, Oxford.

(12) The Mythology of All Races, vol. V, p. 293. In Genesis 1:2 the Hebrew word "tehom" is designated "the deep."

(13) Harwood, op. cit., p. 57.

(14) Baal is a Semitic word that means "lord." Bel-Merodach is an alternate spelling of the same name.

(15) Greenberg, Gary. 101 Myths of the Bible How Ancient Scribes Invented Biblical History. (Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2000), pp. XII-XIII.

(16) In mythology, castrating a defeated king symbolized depriving him of his power. This symbolism is seen in the story of Noah, who, according to Jewish tradition, was castrated by his son Ham, who sought to displace his father. Sometimes the castration was symbolically carried out by raping the conquered king's wife. This was the reason behind the rape of King David's wives by his son Absalom.

(17) Mackenzie, Donald A. Mythology of the Babylonian People. Reprint of the 1915 edition titled Myths of Babylonia and Assyria. (London: Braken Books, Random House, UK Ltd., 1996), p. 145.

(18) Albright, William Powell. Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan. (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1968), p. 232.

(19) See Strong's numbers 119, 122, 124.

(20) So blatant was this discrepancy, that the Jews have a legend about this first woman, who they called Lilith. According to the story, she demanded full equality with Adam, and thus was unacceptable as a wife. The long and short of the legend is that she became a demon, and allusions to her are not only found in the Tanakh/Old Testament, her evils are outlined in the Talmud as well. See Louis Ginzberg. The Legends of the Jews. Translated from the German Manuscript of Henrietta Szold 5 Volumes, (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1937), Volume I "Bible Times and Characters from the Creation to Jacob". Also see, The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, op. cit., Vol. 7, p. 63, article "Lilith".

(21) Nashim Yebamoth 63a: "R. Eleazar further stated: What is meant by the Scriptural text, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh?13 This teaches that Adam had intercourse with every beast and animal but found no satisfaction until he cohabited with Eve."

(22) The story of the first woman being formed from a rib is a corruption of the Sumerian (the most ancient of Mesopotamian civilizations) myth of Nin-ti (the Lady of the Rib), the mother goddess whose gave life through her rib. (S.H. Hooke, Middle Eastern Mythology. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1963, p. 115) Significantly, in the New Testament Paul disputes God's wisdom here. In 1 Cor. 7:27 he writes: "Art thou loosed from a wife? Seek not a wife," and in 1 Cor. 7-7-8 he writes, "I would that all men were even as I myself [i.e., single] ... I say therefore to the unmarried and widows. It is good for them if they abide even as I."

(23) Adam & Eve; Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender. Edited by Kristen E. Kvan, Linda S. Schearing and Valarie H. Ziegler. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 3.

(24) Dr. Henry Halley notes that in the library of Asshur-bani-pal of Assyria, clay tablets relating the epic of creation were found, which also mention the sabbath: "... the '7th' day was appointed a 'holy day,' and 'to cease from all business commanded.'" Halley, Henry H. Halley's Bible Handbook. (Halley's Bible Handbook Inc., 1965), p. 62.

(25) The Mythology of All Races. (Boston: Marshall Jones Co., 1932, Volume V), p. 153. See also, Eddy, Sherwood. God in History. (New York: Association Press, 1947), p. 48. In addition to the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, the Egyptians also had a seven-day week, each day being assigned as a holy day to one of their deities. The Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed., Vol. IV, pp. 664-665. The Encyclopedia Britannica. 9th Edition. (New York: Henry G. Allen Co. n.d.) See also Hastings, James. Hastings' Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1917), Vol. X, p. 890.

(26) The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia. (New York: The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Inc., 1942), Vol. 9, p. 295, article "Sabbath."

(27) See The New Brown-Driver-Briggs-Gesenius Hebrew-English Lexicon, number 3117 for the clear meaning that this word is associated with the daylight hours.

(28) Venable, W. H. 1987, Information Theory and Biblical Inerrancy. Also see, "Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith", Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation 39(3) p. 168-170, and C. E. Shannon, "A mathematical theory of communication," Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27, pp. 379-423 and 623-656, July and October, 1948.

(29) p. 183.

(30) The Mythology of All Races, op. cit., pp. 183-185. The Tagtug legend tells of Nammu, the Mother Goddess of the primeval sea "who gave birth to heaven and earth." It also relates how the first humans "... had not yet conceived heaven and hell, eternal reward and punishment; they offered prayer and sacrifice not for 'eternal life,' but for tangible advantages here on earth. Later legend told how Adapa, a sage of Eridu, had been initiated into all lore by Ea, goddess of wisdom; one secret only had been refused him—the knowledge of deathless life. Another legend narrated how the gods had created man happy; how man, by his free will, had sinned, and been punished with a flood, from which but one man—Tagtug the weaver—had survived. Tagtug forfeited longevity and health by eating the fruit of a forbidden tree." Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage (part one of The Story of Civilization. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), pp. 128-129.

(31) Ginzberg, Louis. The Legends of the Jews translated from the German manuscript of Henrietta Szold, 5 Volumes, (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1937), vol. 1, p. 71. According to rabbinic tradition the name "Eve" is connected to the Aramaic (Hebrew) word for "serpent." See The Oxford Companion of the Bible. Edited by Bruce M. Metzger, Michael D. Coogan. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 207.

(32) Alter, Robert. Genesis Translation and Commentary. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), p. 16.

(33) Walker, Barbara G. Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco A Division of Harper-Collins Publishers, 1983), p. 133.

(34) Josephus, book 1, chap. 3: "Seth was born when Adam was in his 230th year, who lived 930 years. Seth begat Enoch in his 205th year, who, when he lived 912 years, delivered the government to Canaan, his son, whom he had at his 119th year. He lived 905 years. Canaan, when he had lived 910 years, had his son Mahalaleel, who was born in his 170th year. This Mahalaleel, having lived 895 years, died, leaving his son Jared, whom he begat when he was at his 165th year. He lived 962 years and then his son Enoch succeeded him, who was born when his father was 162 years old. Now he, when he had lived 365 years, departed and went to God, whence it is that they have not written down his death. Now Methuselah, the son of Enoch, who was born to him when he was 165 years old, had Lamech for his son, when he was 187 years of age, to whom he delivered the government when he had retained it 969 years. Now Lamech, when he had governed 777 years, appointed Noah, his son, to be the ruler of the people, who was born to Lamech when he was 182 years old, and retained the government 950 years."

(35) Translation by E. A. Speiser, in Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Princeton, N.J.,1950), pp. 60-72, as reprinted in Isaac Mendelsohn (ed.), Religions of the Ancient Near East (New York: Library of Religion paperbook series, 1955), pp. 100-6. The scholarly consensus is that the 7th-century tablets, written in Akkadian, were made from a copy of a 12-tablet dating back to about bce 1200. These were believed composed by a Babylonian priest named Sin-leqi-unninni, and in turn this version is made up of earlier Babylonian traditions, which are rooted in a number of Sumerian stories from about the third millennium bce.

(36) Creation and Flood Myths and Legends: "Explore the Word. Change the World" posted at http://www.teachinghearts.org/dre04legends.html

(37) Lever, Jan. Creation and Evolution. (Grand Rapids: Grand Rapids International Publication, 1958), p. 17.

(38) Moore, Robert. (1983). The Impossible Voyage of Noah's Ark. Creation/ Evolution, Issue XI, p. 24, posted at: http://www.geocities.com/pgspears/fs.html)

(39) Robb, A.M. "Ship-Building" cited in Singer, Charles, Holmyard, E.J., Hall, A.R., and Williams, Trevor (ed.), A History of Technology, vol 5: The Late Nineteenth Century, c1850 to c1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958, pp350-390.

(40) Cole, Michael, M.D. "Noah's Ark, Truth or Myth?" posted @ http://www.westarkchurchofchrist.org/library/noahsark.htm

(41) Cole, Michael, M.D. op. cit.

(42> Cole, Michael, M.D. op. cit.

(43) Archer, Gleason. A Survey of the Old Testament. pp. 210-211, as quoted in The Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy. C. Dennis McKinsey (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1995), p. 222.

(44) Ramm, Bernard. The Christian View of Science and Scripture. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954, pp. 244, 245, as quoted in Woodrow, Ralph Noah's Flood, Joshua's Long Day and Lucifer's Fall What Really Happened? (Riverside, CA: Ralph Woodrow Evangelistic Association, 1984), p. 38.

(45) Cole, Michael, M.D. "Noah's Ark, Truth or Myth?" posted @ http://www.westarkchurchofchrist.org/library/noahsark.htm

(46) Walker, Barbara G. The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), p. 315.

(47) Walker, Barbara G. The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. (San Francisco: Harper, 1988), p. 187; Lurker, Manfred. A Dictionary of Gods and Goddesses, Devils, and Demons. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 359.

(48) Cavendish, Marshall. Man, Myth and Magic. (New York, 1983). Volume II, p. 546. Historian Thomas Taylor says that the deity deprived of his sexuality "... was parted with his divine authority." Taylor, Thomas. The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries. (New York: J.W. Bouton, 1875), p. 34.

(49) The Mythology of All Races. (Boston: Marshall Jones Co., 1932) Volume V, pp. 291-294.

(50) Recorded by the Jewish commentator Rashi (ce 1040-1105). See Aaron, Journey From Eden, p. 58; Ginzberg, Louis The Legends of the Jews. (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1937), Volume I, p. 168. See also, The JPS Torah Commentary, volume one, p. 66. The account of Ham castrating Noah is related in other Rabbinical traditions, as recorded in Louis Ginzberg's The Legends of the Jews, vol. 1, p. 168.

(51) See Goldenberg, David M. The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World). Princeton Univ. Press, 2003; and Haynes, Stephen R. Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press., 2002).

(52) Article, "Nimrod". Another explanation is that he is identical with Ninus, king and founder of ancient Nineveh, the sister city of Babylon. Ninus too was a "mighty hunter" and the founder of the world's first empire. His wife, the infamous Semiramis, is accused of causing his death, and then erecting a temple-tomb in his honor near Babylon.11th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Article, "Ninus". The editors of The Mythology of All Races, Volume XII, p. 362, and Volume V, p. 344, discus the fact that Osiris and Isis were "borrowed from Asari [Tammuz] and Ishtar in prehistoric times." (It is explained that Asari was a title of Marduk who was identical with Tammuz or Dumuzi, who, in turn, is identified as the biblical Nimrod. Ibid., pp. 55, 344.) See also The Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Volume XII, p. 448-459.

(53) Asimov, Isaac. Asimov's Guide to the Bible. Two Volumes in One, The Old and New Testaments. (New York: Wing Books, 1981)pp. 48-54.

(54) pp. 75-76.

(55) The Anchor Bible Genesis, pp. 80-81.

(56) Greenberg, Gary. 101 Myths of the Bible. (Naperville: Illinois: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2000), p. 116.

(57) Gollaher, David L. Circumcision A History of the World's Most Controversial Surgery. (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 1. Religious historians speculate that Abraham's birth occurred about bce 2000, but there is no historical proof for this date as the only way to date Abraham is biblical chronology, which is based on the genealogies found in Genesis.

(58) ibid.

(59) The Egyptian Book of the Dead tells of the sun god Ra circumcising himself, with the blood from the wound created two deities.

(60) Ollivier, Debra S. Circumcision: How Did a Medically Pointless Procedure Become a Routine Practice Performed on a Majority of American Males? Posted at: http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/1998/10/26feature.html Comment: There are numerous web sites that relay in full detail all the horrors of botched circumcisions, which even include numerous deaths. For those who remain skeptical, the editors of darrellwconder.com highly recommend further study into this important medical topic.

(61) The Anchor Bible Genesis, op. cit., pp. 150-152.

(62) Article "Abraham".

(63) Orr, James, M.A., D.D. General Editor. Article "ABRAHAM." International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. 1915. Also, Sayce, A. H. The Higher Criticism and the Monuments (London, 1894). Even in the 4th century ce, Constantine said Abraham's home at the Oak of Mamre was still a pagan shrine: "It is reported that most damnable idols are set up beside it, and that an altar stands hard by, and that unclean sacrifices are constantly offered." Walker, op. cit., p. 5; Frazer, Sir James G. Folk-Lore in the Old Testament. (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1927), p. 335.

(64) See Walker, op. cit., pp. 1094-1095. Also see Hays, H.R. In The Beginning. (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1963), pp. 85, 89; Knight, Richard Payne. A discourse on the Worship of Priapus. (New York: University Books Inc, 1974), p. 113.

(65) Frazer, Sir James G. The Golden Bough (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1922), p. 341.

(66) Sixth Dynasty pyramid of Pepi I, quoted in Greenberg, Gary. 101 Myths of the Bible, p. 143.

(67) Greenberg, Gary. 101 Myths of the Bible, p. 135.

(68) Encyclopedia Britannica. 9th edition, Volume XVIII, p. 802-803, and Volume VI, p. 539. See also The New Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 4, p. 473. See also, Murray-Aynsley, Symbolism of East & West, p. 63. New Shaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, p. 313. These stones are still found all over the Middle and Near East, the most impressive being the giant oblisks of ancient Egypt, and the fancy temple towers of ancient Babylon.

(69) Edwardes, Allen. The Jewel in the Lotus. (New York: Lancer Books, 1965), pp. 65-66; Brasch, R. How Did Sex Begin? (New York: David McKay Co., 1973, p. 152. The ancient Middle Eastern custom of placing one's hands on another testicles to take an oath is the origin of our words "testify" and "testament."

(70) Westropp, Hodder M., Wake Staniland C. Ancient Symbol Worship, Influence of the Phallic Idea in the Religions of Antiquity. (London: 2nd ed. Curzon Press, 1972, first published New York: 1875), p. 38.

(71) See The Oxford Companion to the Bible. Edited by Bruce M. Metzger Michael D. Coogan (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), article "Tribes of Israel," pp. 778-779. Also see The Oxford History of the Biblical World. Edited by Michael D. Coogan. (Oxford: Oxford University, 1998), chapter: "Forging an Identity: The Emergence of Ancient Israel," by Lawrence E. Stager. According to this source, scholars say that ancient Israel was composed of a confederation of tribes moving into Canaan. When a tribe was taken into this confederation, a name was placed in the eponymous list of Jacob's sons. (p. 17)

(72) For those who may argue that the slaves were given to Jacob as wives, let's note that the correct translation of the Hebrew word "ishshah," (Strong's #H802) is "concubine." (See the JPS Tanakh.) A concubine was just another word for a woman who was enslaved to a man, except she had certain privileges.

(73) "Astrology, Judaism and Kabbalah" posted on the Internet @ http://www.astrologynow.com/Astrology.401.htm See also, Dobin, Rabbi Joel C., DD. Kabbalistic Astrology: The Sacred Tradition of the Hebrew Sages. (New York, NY: Inner Traditions International, 1983).

(74) Lauousse Encyclopedia of Mythology. (London: Hamlyn Publishing Group, Ltd., 1968), p. 63. Also see, Assyrian & Babylonian Literature, Selected Translations. (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1901), pg. 131.

(75) Lethaby, W.R. Architecture, Mysticism and Myth. (New York: George Braziller, 1975), p 172.

(76) de Lys, Claudia. The Giant Book of Superstitions. (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1979), p. 336.

(77) Bromberg, Walter. From Shaman to Psychotherapist. (Chicago: Henry Regney Co., 1975), pg. 11. See Strong's #11m as used in Job 26:6, Job 28:22, Job 31:12. Also see, the Anchor Bible Dictionary, article: APOLLYON: "The Greek name, meaning 'Destroyer,' given in Revelation 9:11 for 'the angel of the bottomless pit' (in Hebrew called Abaddon), also identified as the king of the demonic 'locusts' described in Revelation 9:3-10...In one manuscript, instead of Apollyon the text reads "Apollo," the Greek god of death and pestilence as well as of the sun, music, poetry, crops and herds, and medicine. Apollyon is no doubt the correct reading. But the name Apollo (Gk Apollon) was often linked in ancient Greek writings with the verb apollymi or apollyo, 'destroy.' From this time of Grotius, 'Apollyon' has often been taken here to be a play on the name Apollo. The locust was an emblem of this god, who poisoned his victims, and the name 'Apollyon' may be used allusively in Revelation to attack the pagan god and so indirectly the Roman emperor Domitian, who liked to be regarded as Apollo incarnate."

(78) Walker, op.cit., pp. 2,3, 480.

(79) Budge, Sir E.A. Wallis. Gods of the Egyptians (2 vols). (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), pp. 2, 53.

(80) Clayton, Peter A. Chronicle of the Pharaohs The Reign-By-Reign Record of the Rulers and Dynasties of Ancient Egypt. (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1994), article: "Djoser".

(81) Notice this definition of the Zodiac from the American Heritage Talking Dictionary: "A band of the celestial sphere ... that represents the path of the principal planets, the moon, and the sun. In astrology, this band divided into 12 equal parts called signs, . . bearing the name of a constellation for which it was originally named but with which it no longer coincides owing to the precession of the equinoxes. (The Learning Company, Inc., 1997.)

(82) In the days when religion and medical science were almost indistinguishable, masturbation was held responsible for a host of ailments. Consequently, horrible medical abuses were practiced upon the young of both sexes to save them from their "sin." Religionists were particularly fond of citing the "medical evidence" to prove that God was all-wise for condemning masturbation. A host of ailments were cited as proof: Insanity, venereal disease, stunted growth, impotence, blindness, cancer, and ultimate death. (Even into the twentieth century, doctors were still preaching against the evils of masturbation, with an amen chorus from many in religion.) The cures for this "plague of Onan" varied, with the most extreme being surgery.

(83) Genesis 38:15.

Copyright © 2007 by Darrell W. Conder, Port Townsend, Washington. All Rights Reserved.